


An Assortment of Polaroids

by monochromatic



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sburb Session, Drug Use, M/M, Rimming, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-17
Updated: 2013-12-05
Packaged: 2017-11-25 20:28:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 20
Words: 58,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/642663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/monochromatic/pseuds/monochromatic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Anachronistic snapshots of Bro's relationship to Dave, in all its variegation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Striders' Day Out

**Author's Note:**

> There will be no smut in the initial chapter because of Dave's age, but it will definitely be introduced around chapters three or four.

This neighborhood is pretty much trash, but at least there’s a nice park nearby.

Dave races from his bedroom in ricocheting zigzag combat formation and comes to an abrupt and shuddering halt just short of bowling you over.

“What’d I say about running in the house, kiddo?”

His face is red and he’s still catching his breath, but in his little pipsqueak baby voice, he points out, “But Bro, this isn’t a house.” Checkmate.

The elevator’s busted again, so you’re resigned to several flights of stairs. Your unfortunate inconvenience is Dave’s delightful novelty, though, which makes the situation a trifle more tolerable.

In the lobby – a narrow foyer with an entire wall of broken post boxes – Dave tugs at the hem of your shirt. Instinctively, you crouch down and try not to complain while his miniature kiddie shoes dig into your ribcage. Righting yourself, you give him a moment to get comfortable; shifting all of his forty pounds back and forth, he’s anchoring himself on your shoulders the way you taught him, allowing for use of your hands if need be. Your descent down the front steps shakes him and his hands slap awkwardly onto your face, hammy little fingers (sticky with God-only-knows…) threatening an impromptu mining expedition into your nasal cavity.

“Hey, cool it up there.”

“Sorry, Bro.”

This isn’t how you planned to raise a kid, due in large part because you hadn’t planned it at all, not even in the vague, far-off sense of ‘someday…’ But when your parents croaked, they left you with Dave, and not much else, since, in lieu of a village, it has taken an inheritance to raise a child.

From the crow’s nest, Dave must’ve spotted the vibrant stucco storefront because he’s kicking you in the chest and shouting a chorus of, “Bro! Bro! Bro!”

“I know, lil’ man, I’ve got you covered.” You excavate your wallet from your back pocket, nearly dislodging Dave in the process.

Inside the air-conditioned store, Dave plays at steering you around with a hand placed firmly on either side of your face, fingers clutching your sideburns, and you humor him. As Dave selects his apple juice, you afford yourself a derisive snort at the price of milk. You make a mental note to take the bus to Wal-Mart this payday, effectively averting a Coco Puffs crisis. It’s hard to be socially conscious _and_ be a young, single parent. At the counter, Dave demands a Kit-Kat, and you tell him no. Subsequently, when you buy a pack of American Spirits, it’s Dave’s turn to snort.

“You said you were gonna’ quit.” Dave rests his chin on your head. One of his tiny hands slides down your neck, pausing on your shoulder. You put one of your own hands over it.

“After I finish this pack, kiddo.”

Through some act of childish mercy, he doesn’t remind you that you said that last time. Instead, he curls his hand up in yours and says, “Okay.”

Down the block there’s a makeshift fountain, born of a busted hydrant. Deliberately, you walk through the spray just to hear the high pitch of Dave’s warbling screech as it weaves into the cacophony of giggles and shouts. You smile, and pray he doesn’t turn out too much like you.

The park rises out of the asphalt horizon like an oasis in the Sahara, and Dave reacts with appropriate enthusiasm. He gets a little too rambunctious for your liking, and like any beast of burden, you make him well aware. Securing his shins, you buck your shoulders a bit – the emptiest threat you’ve ever made. Dave squeals and locks his limbs around you, but he’s giggling. Finding a bench under some coveted shade, you set Dave on the ground. You give him an encouraging pat and he takes off like a windup-toy, making a beeline for the see-saw. You watch, lighting up, as he begins his favorite game, delicately balancing himself at its fulcrum. He appears to have mastered the trick, so you turn your gaze elsewhere. Other parents are here with their kids, all of them in various states similar to yours: too young, measuring their worth against government criteria. These are kids with kids, and it shows. But at other playgrounds, on other occasions, you’ve witnessed an equal-and-converse phenomenon: parents – legitimate, fully-grown adults – playing with their kids. These parents, with their double-decker strollers and name-brand snack foods, are living vicariously through their kids, a truly bizarre parallel of the sweet games their children compose from the gritty fiber of adult nuisances like groceries and dinner and taxes.

Your cigarette is on the ground, smoldering, and you’ve only noticed because Dave is in front of you, knocking on your knee. “Bro, play!”

He looks so hopeful, but you are exhausted from your shift last night; didn’t get in until half-past midnight and couldn’t sleep besides. Then, Dave woke up early this morning and went banging around the kitchen until you threw up the white flag and fixed him breakfast. And now here he is, shaking your leg with all the force of an incensed chihuahua.

But this is it, you remember. In two weeks, Dave starts school.

“Okay, what do you wanna’ play?”

“Pony?”

Your shoulders sag. How could you have forgotten? “Sorry, lil’ man; I left the ponies at home.”

Dave gives a few shakes of the head and pulls at you. “No, no, pony, not _ponies_.”

Oh. You sigh and get to all fours, letting Dave clamber up. Giving exactly zero fucks about the chuckling in your general direction, you haul Dave around the aerated grass, slowing whenever he swings low to pick a dandelion. You are a good and loyal steed.

Around noon, Dave is getting cranky. It’s a little past nap time and you need to get home and whip up lunch. You also have about a million phone calls to make: inquiries about your mysteriously disappeared dental insurance, appointments with the doctor to cancel (for you), appointments with the doctor to schedule (for Dave), et cetera – all before your six o’ clock class.

Halfway home, the little guy gets his snooze on mid-piggyback, and an opportunity unfolds. You stop at the store again and purchase a Kit-Kat bar. The cashier – familiar with this game from countless times before – manually rings in the candy, rather than scanning the code and potentially alerting Dave to dessert. He smiles at you widely as you leave, and you nod at him, managing a low, sloppy salute.

At the apartment building, you carry Dave up the stairs bridal style, for fear of gravity. Juggling him and the key is a spectacular feat, but you are nothing if not spectacular. Shutting the door as softly as possible, you narrowly avoid disaster, tripping halfway down the short hall before finding your center of gravity.

Dave slumbers on.

You put him in his bed and cover him up with a sheet. His room needs cleaning, desperately; his toys – stolen from Happy Meals to be wrapped under the Christmas tree – litter the floor, craggy little death traps as far as your feet are concerned. Crayons lie loose, given free-range of the shitty carpet that you’ve said you were going to chuck for three summers now. Taking a scribble from the floor, you add it to the exhibition on the second-hand fridge.

Lunch turns out to be homemade chicken salad on pumpernickel for Dave, and a can of Spaghettios for you, heated against a gentle bed of police sirens anda roaring crowd at Minute Maid Park.


	2. Brunch At Tiffany's

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fourteen-year-olds are difficult and nobody understands.

You're deep conditioning when there's a knock on the bathroom door. It's hard and succinct – a moot warning as opposed to a polite question. Dave moseys on in without nary a greeting or acknowledgment of any sort. You hear the porcelain thunk of the toilet lid and the steady stream of Dave's morning piss. 

“You gonna' get in next, kid?”

“And wait for the tank to fill back up?” he snorts. “Rain check.” He flushes with all the smug satisfaction of the teenaged asshole he is and shuts the door.

Your shower turns icy and you still need to rinse. “That little shit.”

When you emerge from the bathroom, Dave is splayed across the unmade futon, side-eying you from behind his new shades – a gift from that internet friend of his. You actually like them; they suit his face. 

In the Strider residence, privacy is the curious stuff of legend, an elusive myth told and retold by wizened veterans of the Round Table. Privacy is your Great White Whale. Mostly, this is dictated by the available space in a one-bedroom apartment – something you could easily remedy, now that your bank account isn't so sparse. But Dave is too happy to remain in this shit hole; he's come to love it more than it deserves. And you love Dave more than he sometimes really deserves, so here you are.

“Go get dressed.”

“I will.” Dave is an obstinate prick, but in the case of Sunday Brunch, you have some prime leverage. 

“Now, or we don't go.”

Dave throws his hands up in defeat and ambles around the corner, down the hall to his room. Ice T's _Cop Killer_ promptly radiates through the floor, but if that's all the kid can offer in defiance, you'll take it. The neighbors haven't succeeded in getting you evicted yet, after all.

You've only just slipped into your jeans when Dave appears as if from thin air, back on the couch. A stray water droplet escapes through your hair, trickling down, fielding a shoulder blade, navigating the curve of your spine. You only notice because you're certain you're not the only one. Unnerved, you scramble into your shirt.

The Dodge is sitting pretty by the curb, right where you parked her. When you purchased this majestic beast, you were frankly concerned about the possibility of vandalism. Of course, factoring in the neighbors' suspension lifts and illegal undercarriage kits, you're hardly the biggest douche on the block.

Dave climbs into the cab with a smirk, sidling up next to you, almost like he's in on some private joke. He probably thinks he is. Dave's perspective on owning a pickup is some convoluted rubber-band ball of anti-logic: a deep misconception of irony and an outdated commentary on the machismo complex buried at the core of every frat kegger known to man. 

Your perspective is that sound equipment is fucking heavy, and this baby gets thirty miles to the gallon. 

Halfway down the freeway, Dave attempts to commandeer the radio. He's reached that pretentious stage of adolescence where he listens to music he can't understand on the premise that it represents some type of Golden Age – an age, you've given up on pointing out, that he wasn't even alive to experience. 

You switch the station back.

Dave pushes his shades down his nose, his scarlet stare drilling relentlessly into your peripheral. He reaches for the tuner. So fast that neither of you sees it, you smack his hand away.

“Augh!” He shakes his hand out and hisses. “Bitch move, Bro! C'mon, you don't even _like_ this Country shit!”

You keep your eyes on the road. “I like playing it, and I enjoy that I like playing it.” 

Dave slumps back and growls.

“I like this Country shit better than you like that old school Hip-Hop. You came at Biggie Smalls with a cognitive bias; I came at C.C. Adcock with complete disinterest –” 

Dave groans. “Come on, Bro, step off with your Emmanuel Kant existentialist bullshit.”

You smile. “The school of thought you're looking for is Transcendentalism. And don't be dissing my bro Manny.” As an afterthought, you add, “I knew I should've sent you to Saint Thomas.”

“Yeah, what a sausage fest,” Dave grumbles, reddening in the cheeks.

“Speaking of sausage.” You pull into the diner parking lot, miraculously finding a spot under the eaves.

Tiffany's is this great little American Eats joint that your Dad took you to when Mom would take off for a few days at a time. You never really understood the language of your parents as they passed from room to room, never speaking to one another unless it was through you. Even as an adult, it was too complicated to disentangle perception from reality. You remember feeling like the lowest kind of shit the day they died, because your immediate thought was, _At least Dave won't have to suffer through eighteen years of the Broken Marriage Tango._

Abigail, your usual waitress, seats you and doesn't even ask for your drink order. She already knows how to run this show. She's actually the daughter of the woman who waited on you and Dad, and you're filled with a bittersweetness about that. She returns with a black coffee and a big glass of apple juice. 

“The usual for me, thanks Abby,” you drawl at her, pleasant and warm. You're not interested in the slightest, but you like the way she glows when you give her bedroom eyes. 

Dave is still perusing the menu, and you're interested to see which disgusting Frankenstein concoction he'll order this week. Abigail waits patiently, the way she does every Sunday, with a hint of amusement playing pretty across her round cheeks. At last, he orders the High-Hat breakfast platter with a side of everything, sunny eggs and extra crispy bacon, thank you very much.

Even though Abigail is chuckling on her way to the kitchen, you glare at Dave. “Manners; don't be an ass to our lovely hostess.” 

Dave drums his fingers on the enamel tabletop. “Yeah, whatever. Abby's cool.” Rotating so that his back rests against the wall, he asks, “So, you gonna' hit that, or what?” 

“She's not really my type.” You sip your coffee even though it's still scalding. You burn the roof of your mouth, but say nothing.

“Yeah, guess so. You should ask if she has a brother,” Dave says nastily. 

You sigh. “Kid, you are so deep in the closet, it's pathetic. Give my regards to Mr. Tumnus next time you meet for tea, okay.” When Dave just looks at you like you're speaking in Greek, you sincerely ask, “Do you even read?” 

He at least has the dignity to roll his eyes and get huffy with you. 

“In all seriousness, though, it can't be healthy for you to internalize your desperate obsession with dick. Just face the facts and join the choir already.” You jest, but you can see in the discomfort on Dave's face that you hit a little too close to home. The bottom of your stomach drops and suddenly your appetite dries up.

“I swear,” he mumbles, “sometimes I think you and Lalonde must be related.”

Before you can so much as ask who Lalonde is, your food has arrived. You pick at your home fries, letting them cool, while you watch Dave wrap up his sausage links and bacon inside each pancake, drizzle the creation with syrup, and then puncture his egg yolks for maximum dipping capacity. 

“Voila,” he says through a full mouth, “breakfast burrito á la Strider.”

“I wouldn't eat that if it was the last food on earth.”

“What if I gave you a grand?”

“You don't have a grand.”

“That's irrelevant, just answer the question.”

“You know,” your stomach is turning just watching him. A strand of yellow yolk is dripping down his chin; you're going to be sick. “One day – possibly sooner rather than later – your metabolism is going to realize what an abusive relationship it's in. It's gonna' pack up and leave your sorry ass, and then you'll have no one but yourself to blame.”

“Naw,” Dave licks his face, slovenly and tactless. “It'll threaten divorce, but instead it'll just stay at its mother's for a weekend here and there.”

And now it's Dave who has hit a little too close to home. You have nothing productive to add to this conversation, so instead you tuck neatly into your potatoes, intermittently chasing them with coffee. In your head, you're eleven years old again and Mom is screaming at Dad as she storms out the front door, swearing that this is the last time, never again, et cetera, et cetera...

“Hey, Bro?” Dave's voice is a raw, candid whisper, startling you. It's a rare thing these days, an island of reassurance amidst the insistent melee of juvenile arrogance. 

“What's up?”

“I, uh...” he scratches his neck and his cheeks drain of color. He's getting freckles. The feeling that gives you is confusing and inexplicable. “The gay jokes don't, like, bother you, right?” 

Oh, come on. “No, kiddo, but try to remember that not everyone is as cool in their skin as I am. Shit's disrespectful as hell and you know it.”

“Yeah, yeah.” He kicks you softly under the table, more of a nudge that makes you infinitely more uncomfortable, and you suddenly wish he _had_ kicked you. 

The drive home is quiet. You stop for gas, and Dave only touches the radio to dial it up a bit. 


	3. A Spoonful of Sugar

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> No Bro don't that's how you catch Mono.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And now, for some hot brother-macking, brought to you today by my own debilitating plague. Thanks for the kudos and comments so far; I hope I don't let y'all down <3
> 
> Update: now with fantastic art ([here](http://singleton-instance.tumblr.com/post/44866776211/so-you-kiss-him-more-kiss-him-up-and-down-kiss) and [here](http://singleton-instance.tumblr.com/post/44854778251/bro-will-you-w-will-you-come-do-the-thing-do)) by tumblr user singleton-instance.

 As an infant, Dave was fraught with colic; nothing but soy milk for that kid, as you learned after one too many ruined shirts. Even as he grew, it never left him. Dave's anxiety has always manifested in tummy troubles, emotional distress sending him into fits of gastro-intestinal hell. But years of this, and you haven't gotten used to it. He's sick tonight – quite out of the blue – and every time his vomit hits the bowl, you wince. You asked if he wanted your help, but he just screamed at you to let him be. 

He hates for you to see him like this, you know, but your instincts are crying out against all reason. Every cough, every wretch sends alarmed shivers through your skin. You should be helping, but instead, you're just sitting at the kitchen table, unsure of how to proceed. 

There is silence for a time, punctured by a weak moan that echoes off the bathroom floor. You listen to Dave brush his teeth, gargle and spit. The sink runs and you just wish he would let you help.

He approaches the kitchen, dragging his feet, stumbling over himself. He's white as a sheet except for the dark circles around his eyes, like he's healing from a broken nose. His forehead is glistening with sweat but his teeth chatter when he murmurs, “B-Bro?”

“Dave?”

“Bro will you...w-will you come do the thing?”

All too eager to help, you don't bother with cool or calm. “Do what thing?”

“You know. The thing. The tummy thing?”

You're hesitant. Things have been...strange, between the two of you lately. Dave flits in and out of the apartment like a shadow, consumed with music, with his after-school job, with John and Jade and Lalonde, with anything but home. That stings like a foreign, miserable venom that's gotten under your skin, and you don't know the treatment, can't even identify the snake that bit you. 

“Will it make you feel better?”

“Maybe, yeah.”

“Alright.” You follow Dave into his bedroom; you don't know why, but you shut the door. You shared this room with him until he was three years old. And even then, most nights he would totter out to the couch and climb in next to you, and you couldn't say you minded all that much. Now, you're sitting on the edge of his bed, watching him settle into the covers. He looks at you expectantly, as if to ask just what the hell you're waiting for.

Placing your hand gently on his stomach, you begin rubbing in wide circles over the cotton of his days-old tee-shirt. He closes his eyes, looking peaceful – too peaceful, and in conjunction with his ashen skin and bruised eyes, it scares you. To rouse him, you brush his shirt up, rubbing bare skin. His eyes fly open, blood red against violent black-and-blue. His skin is feverish, and more than once you've suggested taking him to the ER, but he shoots you down every time. And you know that when Dave gets a fever, it just means he's on the last leg of illness, but you can't help but worry every time. 

Dave's stomach is a wall of taut, lean muscle. His abdominals flutter underneath your fingers and, in turn, your heart pounds against your ribcage like a trapped beast, threatening to break free. These sensations are déjà vu – infuriatingly familiar, but just slightly beyond reach of recognition.

“Better?” 

“Almost,” he hums. “But, Bro, could you uh...do the _other_ thing?”

This time, you don't have to ask what he's referring to. And this time, you're more than a bit hesitant. “Don't you think you're too old for that?” you ask sternly, and wow, are you ever breaking a sweat.

Dave shrugs, but his eyes are watering around the corners.

It isn't a fair fight, not by a long shot. “Okay, okay, fine.” You reposition yourself so that you're leaning over Dave. You just stare at him for a moment, at the crossroads of muscle where his bellybutton is. Then you move in, delivering a quick, chaste kiss to his tummy. You glance up, hoping to find Dave's approval.

“More.” 

You can't pinpoint why, but the act of kissing Dave's stomach unsettles you, sets your own gut pitching like a ship on high seas. You did this for him all the time as a kid – why should it bother you now? So you go full-speed ahead, kissing him in expedient succession, your lips lingering longer and longer on his burning flesh. And he sounds good, so good, humming and sighing and sounding considerably better than when he was practically keeling over in the bathroom. So you kiss him more, kiss him up and down, kiss him until your lips part and suddenly your kisses get wet and sloppy and, without warning, you're kissing him not like a child, but like a lover.

Dave's fingers are curled up in your hair, having knocked your hat askew. You think that perhaps fevered delirium is setting in and you stop, take a step back, take a breath or two. 

“Dave?”

“Bro,” he rumbles. His voice, usually a smooth tenor, has sunken into a ragged baritone. Suddenly, the déjà vu is a full-fledged memory. “Bro, please.” His hold on your hair tightens, and he pushes you down, and maybe _you're_ the sick one, maybe this is a fever dream, because you're ensconcing his chest and belly with kisses: dry, open-mouthed, sometimes playfully nipping... But this isn't a dream and you thankfully catch yourself and stop, resting your forehead against Dave's stomach, winded and debased. 

“Dave, no.”

“ _Bro_!” 

“Dave, I can't.”

“Bro, _please_!” He's on the verge of tears. You don't look at him. You spare yourself. 

“No, I –” 

“But Bro, I love you.” 

You sit up and sigh, tired and frustrated. There isn't enough blood in your brain for this conversation. “I think you're confused.”

“I'm not.” He wrangles his voice in, cages your wrist in a gentle hold. “I know the difference.”

“It's hero worship.”

“No, listen.”

“No, _you_ listen.” You're angry. You're an unwieldy maelstrom of disoriented pain. Most of all, you are terrified. “I have been the only constant in your entire life; I get that. I love you unconditionally, despite all the bullshit I have to put up with. You and I are in each other's faces day in and day out, and that's how it's been since you were four months old. Now, here's what's going to happen.” You refuse to look at Dave, but you know he's biting his lip, trying to hold it all back. The dam is cracking and you have to act fast. “I am going back to my goddamn couch. You're going to take some goddamn Pepto and go to sleep. And we shall never speak of this again.”

“But –”

“ _Goodnight_ , Dave.” You get up. You turn out his light and go to the kitchen, filling a glass with cool water. You return to him, leave the water on the end table, a stained-glass silhouette set aglow by the street lights that peek in through the blinds. You find Dave in the dark and smooth his bangs back, and kiss his warm forehead. “Goodnight,” you whisper.

Then you turn your back on him and leave.

 

 

In the morning, your head is throbbing. Your stomach is doing somersaults and your mouth feels swollen and dry. This is the worst hangover, and you didn't even get drunk. 

Almost immediately, Dave's door creaks open. He meanders slowly into the living room, getting in your space, pushing himself under your arm.

“How're you feeling, kid?”

“Okay, I guess.”

He's shirtless, and little bruises are visible where you bit him last night, in your weak moment of broken sanity. You press a palm to his chest, trace one of the marks with your fingers, remorseful. “Dave, I am so sorry.”

He gets your wrist in a vise grip and presses you impossibly closer to him. “Don't.” After a moment, he cranes his neck and kisses you under your jaw. You are paralyzed. “I'm not confused. And neither are you, obviously.” He's chuckling. How can he laugh at this. This is not a joke. 

“We share DNA.”

“Uh-huh.”

“This isn't fair to me. You know I have a hard time saying no to you.”

Dave recoils from you, his eyes hardened and his jaw rigid. “Whoa, time out. Look, if you don't want me, that's one thing.” You want to stop him right there because it's immensely difficult to extrapolate your concept of not wanting him from his. “But I don't want you to pity me, man, I want you to want me.”

You press him back under your arm. You kiss his dumb face. His body seems to sing with it. 

“I love you,” you whisper, “but I'm your guardian. I take care of you.”

“Maybe,” he pauses, “maybe I don't need that anymore.”

It's your turn to chuckle, now. “Yeah you do.”

He growls. “Fight me.” He kisses you, not prying, not forceful, just moving his lips against yours. It's nice. It's easy, mortifyingly so. And you don't so much fight him as you endure him, until you can't anymore and you break and kiss him back. His arms trap your neck and lure you in, and you go willingly, biting the apple because it is delicious and because it's been dangling in front of you all this time, and you've always been a sucker for temptation. Dave's kisses are sweet and slow, surprisingly au fait for a sixteen-year-old. He doesn't rely so heavily on tongue (the way you did at his age), but employs it sparsely and with an expert sense of timing. He's more about texture, about the sensual slide of lips against one another, of teeth sinking into pliable flesh.

You haven't been kissed like this in a long, long time.

Holding him to your chest, you whisper against his ear, “Pretty good, for a minor.”

He grins. “This isn't exactly virgin land you're conquering here, Bro.” 

You cringe. “Ew.”

“If it makes you feel any better,” he's speaking against your lips, teasing you, “if we get far enough, you'll be the first to conquer the back woods.”

“Jesus Christ.” You lay back down, your head spinning, and Dave settles on top of you, stroking your chest through your shirt. He kisses your neck and rests in its hollow.

After a while, you ask him if he's feeling better.

“Loads,” he exhales, and it sinks into your skin.

“Good.” You shift him, giving yourself room to breathe. “Better go do your homework, because you're going to school.”

He groans and hurls a pillow at your face. You take it with a grain of salt. 

“Don't think this changes anything, I'm still in charge of kicking your ass until graduation.”

“Whatever, you gigantic dork.” He kisses your cheek and goes to his room. He starts up his morning playlist and you are lulled by the sense that not too much is changed.


	4. In the Beginning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This universe operates on parallels; the Strider household is no exception.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't know what happened here. My hand truly did slip.

 It's springtime and there's a heavy downpour rap-tap-tapping on the window in front of your face. A lot of people would find that distracting, like the buzz of some incessant mosquito or a broken record as it catches and locks into a staccato groove. You just think of it as a metronome. The rain is a gentle timepiece, steadfast but unobtrusive. It keeps your focus as you work, setting your pace and maintaining some semblance of balance. Just a few more stitches and – 

_BAM_. The apartment door bursts wide open, thwacking angrily into the kitchen counter. It manages to remain hinged, though the same cannot be said for your concentration. More paramount than your ever-threatened security deposit, however, is little Dave, drenched and crumpled in a heap in the archway, blood all down the front of his shirt. 

You're at his side in a nanosecond, unfinished plush be damned.

He snivels into your shoulder the whole way to the bathroom where you set him on the sink and remove the damaged garment. Inspecting his wound, it appears to be shallow; the laceration reaches along his small stomach (still pudgy with baby fat). It bled thick, though. 

Dabbing it with a warm cloth, you ask, “How did this happen?”

Dave sniffs and looks anywhere but at you. 

Still dabbing, you persist, “Dave.”

“I...” his voice shakes and he's clearly teetering on the verge of another jag. “I...”

With your free hand, you fuss at his bangs and caress his cheek with your thumb. “Hey, come on, now.”

“Bro, please don't be mad at me, _please_?” he begs, tears collecting in his lashes. “I didn't know it would go so bad and I was all alone and I was too short for the buttons –”

He walked himself all the way up the stairs like this. “Dave, just tell me what happened.” You aren't sure why you're panicking. It's just a cut. Some ointment and a band aid will do the trick. Dave succumbs to a fit of jitters when he sees you open the medicine cabinet and produce the ointment, as if the tingly sting is less bearable than the fall he took to acquire his battle scar. You hush him with a finger to his lips and remind him that you can't put on the finishing touch without the first two steps.

His fingers brace against the sink's edge so hard, they turn red, and then white.

It only takes the tip of your pinky to smear on the antiseptic, and then with precision, you stick the biggest band aid you have neatly over the cut. You seal the deal with a kiss, and Dave stops crying altogether, only a hiccup or two left in his reservoir. He hops down from the sink and investigates your handiwork, clearly pleased with your selection in bandages – white with red crocodiles. 

“Thanks, Bro.”

You steer him out of the bathroom with a hand on his back and lead him over to the kitchen, where he will eventually let slip over some animal crackers and juice that he was doing the thing you asked him not to do: he played on the slippery stone steps in the rain, and that's how he fell and hurt himself.

You will not get mad as he feared, but instead fade into cool disappointment, which Dave will discover is infinitely worse...

 

 

All of ten years later, and this memory still serves itself with a garnish of pain. But this time, the pain is enunciated concisely with a new, fresher underpinning you hadn't been aware of until now. Even then, even when Dave was just a microcosm in the grander scheme of the human lifespan, you had weak moments of broken sanity. Kissing away the pain in his belly, a nebulous half-thought would flicker through the bowels of your subconscious, never long enough for you to know it happened, but there it remained.

These specters have been building up in your head for a while, you suppose. You probably would have gone on, blissfully unaware, channeling this unsavory baseness into another endeavor, had Dave not wrenched the safety clean off of the gun.

It sure is loaded.

“Bro?” Dave's voice is the spin of the cylinder, echoing menacingly through your skull. Every time he speaks, your brain lights up with potential requests, each more tantalizing and horrifying, one after the other...

_“Bro kiss me, love me, suck me off, let me fuck you, please Bro? Pretty please?”_

“Bro?”

“What.” You loosen your arm around Dave's shoulders and he wilts. The glow of the television drains him of what little color he possesses. 

“You wanna' order pizza?” 

This will be the third time in a week, but why not.

“Okay, go get the phone.” 

Dave doesn't get up, only shifts his weight into you, his bony knees jabbing you in the thigh. “You know I hate the phone,” he mumbles into his hoodie. 

Sighing – a bizarre slurry of relief and irritation – you get up and find the phone yourself, lodged under a mound of plush rump. After calling in the order, you drop next to Dave and shove him. “You need to learn to deal with people, kid. What're you gonna' do when –” Oh. You were going to ask what he will do when you're not around, but then, if this...whatever it is...works out, then you'll always be around. 

Dave's face is pointed toward the screen, but you know he's gazing at you out of the corner of his vision. 

“Never mind.”

You swear he smirks as he leans into your arm again.

His hand finds yours, but he doesn't hold it so much as he begins to massage it, fingertips pressing tenaciously into the meat of your palm, rubbing the long stems of your fingers. You can't pull it back because stupidly, you trapped your arm between his back and the couch and now you must suffer the consequences. He pulls your glove off and you feel oddly exposed as he tangles your fingers together, palms pressed tight. Your stomach just about dissolves when, in addition to the hand-holding, Dave rests his face against your neck and peppers it with feathery phantoms of kisses. His breath, humid and uneven, buffers along your skin like so many tempests. Dave is an impending hurricane and you are a man ravaged from drought. 

He moans, low, reticent, close-mouthed just below your ear; your blood simmers in your veins. 

“Did you wear this for me?” He inhales you for emphasis. “How did you know I have a weakness for cheap-ass cologne, you sly dog?” He's grinning and your euphoria has been rendered to aggravation. 

“C'mere, you spoiled little fuck.” You haul him onto your lap, kissing him on the mouth with all the aggression and vindictive resolve of sibling rivalry. He matches you for it, but the whole affair quickly devolves into the clumsiest round of necking you've ever taken part of. He sighs and gasps and groans into your mouth, and you devour it the way you can't devour him: passionately and all at once. Drought results in famine, after all, and you have grown reckless from starvation.

Dave's thighs are shaking around yours, and every muscle in his body is straining for control. He's trying so hard and it's so cute that you just want to hand him a fucking ribbon. 

“ _Shut up_.”

Oops, you must've said that out loud.

So the deluge has begun and Dave, having lost all facility, is grinding in your lap, sinking his teeth into your shoulder through your shirt, right where you like it. You find his hips and squeeze, driving him harder into you, bargaining for friction. 

“ _Bro_.”

Your heady momentum grates to a halt and you hold him still, push him away. “Don't call me that when we're...fucking around.” 

Rocking back and forth, he asks, “What the fuck do I call you, then?”

“How about my name.” 

There is something unfathomably finite inside this request. Some primitive, clandestine part of you understands that for Dave to call you by your name is a kind of seal on this grotesque covenant the two of you have forged. If he complies, then it's all over. Sliding your hand under the hem of his hoodie, you stroke his navel, finding the soft trail of fuzz and following it down.

Dave bites his lip and hisses. “ _Dirk_.”

Who knows, maybe this is just the beginning.

He forces his mouth on yours and no longer stays the course of sweet or slow. Instead, he is combative and ungainly and fervid and...well, sixteen. It's reassuring, in a way, having Dave lay into you like a kid into cake. It's especially nice when he takes your hand – the one without a glove – and eases it down his body, pushes his stiff erection into it. 

You palm him through slippery gym shorts, teasing him between your fingers and listening to him keen, wondering how often he's fantasized about this, if he has at all. When you go to slip a few fingers under the elastic band, however, he grabs you and nearly breaks your wrist. Grinning, wolfish, he gets all up in your business, your noses less than an inch apart.

“Sorry, not before the third date.”

You blink at him through the dark, bewildered. “How did I raise such a goddamn tease.”

He kisses your cheek and slides his dick against your hand. “Them's the breaks, cowboy.” 

Just as Dave starts to kiss you again, the buzzer goes off. There's a seventy-eight-point-two percent chance that you've never been more frustrated in your entire life. You bemoan your awful luck and push Dave off and make a sad attempt to adjust yourself to preserve the undoubtedly delicate sensibilities of the pizza man. You open the door and steel yourself, ignoring Dave's muffled cackling as it recedes into the fray of terrible TV-movie sound effects. 

The pock-marked kid in your doorway appears to remain oblivious and in karmic gratitude, you tip him extra. 

Dave comes into the kitchen, not to help with the two hot pizza boxes, but to grab himself some of the fine Chinet and dig into his nasty-ass sausage-onion cheese pie. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this was our first time jump! I hope I was concise enough. If not, please, suggest a better format. Thanks for the lovely feedback, and for spreading the word over on tumblr.


	5. Home Movies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Bro goes snooping and gets more than he bargained for.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I worked on this intermittently for twelve hours holy crap.

 You've always figured Dave for a sentimentalist, in his own weird, fucked up fashion. He's a collector, a memorial magpie. He has a tendency to attach value to pieces of shit, and now he's amassed a nest almost two decades in the making. You bet if you searched hard enough, you could probably find some of his old baby toys. But an excavation is not what you came here for.

Your laptop is down for the count, after five years of abuse, and your other two systems are preoccupied with some heavy-duty projects at the moment, so until you get the gumption to head on down to Best Buy, you've executively granted yourself access to Dave's desktop. You're certain he won't mind. 

Mostly, it's just boring business as usual. You check your professional account, making copies of new order forms and adding them to your inventory queue. Your secondary professional account is full to virtually bursting with prospective gigs; some of them engender enthusiasm, some of them are too far away, but in regards to most of them, you're indifferent. You take them on, though, because you still haven't forgotten what it was like to have a day job.

You still have some time to kill, and Dave won't be home for a while. Without much guilt, you begin to peruse his computer, glancing through unfinished comic sketches and an amateur screenplay. In your travels, you come across a suspiciously mundane folder. Dave usually employs charming non sequiturs such as “raging assaholism” and “douchebaggery ahoy” to denominate his files, but this... Just “0.” 

Out of curiosity, you open it.

Your eyes are assaulted by an onslaught of folders, each one labeled with dates. Choosing at random, you click on the one marked December 2014. Three different files appear onscreen, all of them MP4. One of them is dated for the third. 

Dave's seventeenth birthday.

A pit begins to take shape in the bottom of your stomach. You remember that day too well.

 

 

“You prima donna, it's been like an hour and a half.” You've been sitting on the couch waiting for Dave to finish getting ready for his birthday dinner. This year, he insisted on being taken out somewhere classy – a decision he contends was made in the spirit of irony, not in the spirit of your checkbook. Of course, there's always the unspoken truth that Dave really enjoys nice things. If Dave had his way, every day would be the Oscars and he would dress for the occasion.

Personally, you relish the opportunity to get dressed up only for its sparsity. 

“You can't rush art, Bro.” Dave's voice drifts around the corner, entering the room seconds before he does. 

You have to physically restrain yourself from reacting. You should probably offer some sharp retort about art versus kitsch, but _goddamn_.

The kid is fine as hell, and you wonder where he got that jacket tailored because apparently you've got a new rival in town. His hair is swept back, a retro masterpiece à la _Boardwalk Empire_ , and his presentation is fucking flawless. The suit is simple, a classic cut that's in love with Dave for his body and his mind, cinched in all the right places. His tie is long and skinny and – are those cuff links?

“You clean up good, kiddo. Almost like a real adult.”

Dave cocks an eyebrow over his aviators. “You finished, Armani Exchange?”

“Ouch. I'm wounded.” You fling a hand dramatically over your chest.

Dave smiles. “Walk it off.”

The two of you descend the stairwell in amicable silence, your footsteps reverberating in all directions. The harsh light of the bare industrial bulbs throws Dave into a stark contrast, highlighting his elegant cheekbones, the perfect, delicate bridge of his nose.

Yours is slightly crooked, the surviving evidence of a fist-fight in junior high.

Out on the pavement, you snag Dave by the arm and pull him away from the Dodge, much to his surprise. “We're not taking the Beast; the valet would shit himself.” Dave chuckles, but the dry sound diminishes into ash when you round the corner together, and a sleek, black town car is waiting under a streetlight. Before he can accuse you of anything too drastic, you casually inform him that it's a rental. 

Frankly, you believe that like most things, irony has its place, and a five-star sushi restaurant is not it. 

Dave is a piss-poor actor and it's plain on his face that he's impressed with the stops you pulled out tonight, and even more painfully plain is that he's trying desperately to discern how much of this is for Dave your brother, how much is for Dave your date. Sadly, what he doesn't seem to comprehend is that they are the same person.

The benediction of two-week's advance reservation is sweet, sweet validation. Received by a smartly dressed host, you're brought ahead of the line and seated in a secluded corner, left to browse the menus.

“So this is...” Dave is struggling against some internal current, fighting with himself and sinking.

“Romantic,” you supply with a smirk.

“Expensive.” 

“David, me thinks thou doth protest too much.”

“Your pentameter sucks, Bro.”

You kick him under the table and he kicks you back, but the friendly fire ends prematurely when your waiter turns up, more timely than either of you is used to. You order one beer and a water and Dave, ever in the vein of satire, orders a virgin cocktail. 

Despite himself, Dave looks like he belongs here. Not this restaurant specifically, but this atmosphere. Amongst the dim lights, he fits in between the nimble lilt of a handsome shamisen, swaddled by the gem tones and wood paneling in his business-casual attire. In the vaguely prophetic sense, you can see him successfully chasing paper with all that charisma and bravado, however manufactured.

You, Armani Exchange, do not belong here. 

“So,” you tug on the sleeve of his jacket, “where'd you dig up this little treasure?”

Dave shrugs, sipping on his cocktail, admiring the elaborate garnish. “Thrift-store rescue.”

“Really,” you note. 

Smugly, he clarifies, “I fitted it myself.”

You'd be a blatant liar if you said you weren't glowing with pride. Swallowing just a drop or two of that pride, you say, “You know, you look really good tonight.”

“Aw shucks.” Deflective, sarcastic, avoidant. 

“Dave.”

“Dirk.” One of his ankles plants itself between yours and oh, okay, we're crossing the border before the entree even arrives. You're thankful for the dark corner your table is situated in, because the family resemblance is too strong not to give you away if the waiter saw you pawing at each other under the table. You are forever reduced to secretive gestures and double entendres and there is absolutely nothing romantic or exciting about that.

All through dinner, you pick off of each other's plates, sampling and critiquing. Dave doesn't have the palate for heat and spice that you do, his tolerance ending just short of some mild wasabi. He's more of a savory, citrusy type, which you can appreciate, his fondness for sweets aside. You're immensely surprised when he turns down dessert. 

He of course, is immensely miffed when you refuse to let him see the bill.

On the way home, Dave waxes poetic about politics, and you listen. You listen to him speak, straightforward and stripped of his usual cynicism, and it is beautiful. Dave is intelligent in that raw, unassuming way; he doesn't need a sensational platform from which to preach his intellect, nor the usual heap of arbitrary trivia most people drag with them through life, the kind of mind-numbing fact collection the majority incorrectly refers to as intelligence. Dave is sharp, and you like that.

“Anywhere else you wanna' go before we turn in?”

“Nah,” he says, kicking his red sneakers up onto the dashboard, “I'm ready for dessert, now.”

He couldn't have destroyed you more expertly if he'd tried.

 

 

You're paralyzed in Dave's office chair. The file is taunting you, daring you, and you're not sure you're feeling daring today. If this is what you think it is, you don't know how to feel. One part furious, two parts intrigued; two parts turned on, one part flattered with a splash of mild exasperation. You are a veritable aperitif of emotion. 

All of this is hypothetical, seeing as how you don't even know what it is yet. And, well, there's only one way to find out. You turn the volume on low, even though there's nobody else here, and you open the file.

 

 

Dave leads you by the hand through the dark apartment, the two of you tripping and swearing and laughing at each other. It's been years since you've had this with anyone and it wouldn't surprise you if you are sexually stunted at eighteen, when it became abundantly clear that getting laid was impossible with an infant present.

You pause at Dave's room, but he yanks you in by the arm and pushes you against the door, playing at holding you captive. He attaches his mouth to your neck and is making a mockery out of the buttons of your shirt, stopping only once it's open so he can slide his hands up your body. He always does this, always thoroughly feels you up, grabbing and clawing at you as if at any moment you're going to disappear, as if this is all a dream.

You can't say you haven't had a similar inclination. 

He turns on a light and starts to strip. He does this, teases you, and you prepare yourself for inevitable letdown. Except he doesn't stop. He loosens his tie, tugs it away, only to shed his jacket and slither out of his white collared shirt; then the belt is unbuckled, whipped out of its loops with a crack and you gulp. He toes off his sneakers, loses his socks, and then his pants fall into a puddle around his ankles and

_Oh_.

“Fun-fact,” he says blithely, like he isn't completely exposed in a well-lit room, “did you know that seventeen is the age of consent here in the great Lone Star State?” He saunters up to you and presses his naked self against you, lined up real nice, pushing that acrylic nightmare off of your shoulders and kissing your collarbone. Dear God, you don't know where to put your hands, if anywhere, so they just kind of stay suspended in the air, your arms tight with indecision while Dave preys upon your neck. 

“Um.” You look down at him, at his eyes as they examine you hungrily, anticipatory. You're caught between laughter and arousal because _holy shit he's serious_. It's an awkward angle, but you don't care all that much, not when you're sliding Dave's bare skin between your fingers.

“Still not gonna' fuck you,” you remind him between kisses, and he groans.

“Waiting 'til I'm legal won't redeem you in the eyes of the law, you flaming deuce.” He maneuvers the two of you as one entity towards his bed and settles on his back, waiting for you to follow. You kneel down on the floor and undo your own belt and fly, watching him touch himself.

“I'm waiting on my own terms, you rotten piece of jail bait.”

“Malignant brother trap.”

“Keep it up and I'll change my mind to legal-to-drink.”

“I'm sorry, Bro, I didn't mean it, I love you you're pretty now please _it's my birthday_.” 

You chuckle, enjoying the way he rambles on when he gets nervous. Lately, he makes you so goddamn nervous that the role-reversal is a welcome reprieve. You push him and he chortles until you make a move for his navel, kissing along his immaculately trimmed trail of fuzz. You hum into his skin and let that sink in, let it fester in his pores until he begs you. It doesn't take long.

“Dirk, _come on_.”

As much as you enjoy it, antagonizing Dave is an algebraic equation. Whatever you do to his side must be done to yours, and you're not feeling patient tonight; Dave's letting you touch him and you'd like to see how many of your sick fantasies you can act out before choking on your own shame. 

“Tell me what to do.” You are in Dave's space and on Dave's time and, ultimately, it has to be Dave's prerogative what happens in that space and time. You expect him to hesitate, to grapple with his new authority like a kid who's just been handed the key to a Ferrari, but instead, he surprises you.

“Go down on me.” 

He knows what he wants and you wonder how long he's wanted it.

Pressing your lips wetly against his skin, you ease your way into this. No rush. No worries. Just Dave. He feels hot and velvety under your tongue and his smell is pungent and sultry. He tastes good to you, though that's probably just your psyche heightening the experience. Regardless, you lick him more, longer, flattening your tongue over his skin until his voice pierces the room, your name stretched out across the seconds. 

“ _More_.” 

You hope he never finds out how much you like it when he gets demanding with you. Moreover, you really hope he never finds out how challenging it is for you to say no. You take the tip of him into your mouth and gently push against it with your tongue, tasting skin and – _wow_ he is _sweet_. Suddenly, every gallon of apple juice you've ever bought feels like an investment in gold. 

“ _Bro_!”

You pull off and nip him in the thigh. “Hold your horses, kid. And you're forgetting something.”

He curls his fingers in his sheets and groans, stretching a leg over your shoulder. “Sorry, Dirk.”

“That's better.” This time, you take him in your mouth and suck, relaxed and deliberate, a tease for all his trouble. He makes the sweetest little noises, dulcet moans and punchy gasps, his knee knocking into you periodically and you wonder how many blow jobs he's had – or, how many good ones, anyway. You like this too much, his cock in your mouth, the salty-sweet taste of him, his perfect pornstar noises ringing in your ears. You like the way he tries to push himself further in, the way he gets tangled up in his own equivocal litany.

You love his punctured moan when you take a break, resting your cheek on his thigh, pumping him slowly, unsatisfactorily.

“Why the fuck did you stop?” 

“'Cause you're about ready to blow and I've barely revved the engine.” You smile pleasantly up at him, squeezing him for emphasis. “But I think I know just what to do with you.” You can feel his eyes follow you down, feel his uncertainty in his trembling leg. Spreading his ass, you get your first good look at him and moan.

“Dirk, what – _oh my God_.” 

At first, you just kiss him before flicking your tongue against his hole, and he squirms. “Do you like that?” 

“I...” Dave's voice is inundated with breath. “I dunno, maybe? Do you like doing it?”

Burying your face in the crease between his legs, you confess, “I love doing it.”

Dave gulps. “Then, uh, then keep going.”

Hauling him in by the hips, you growl, “Sweetheart, I'm gonna' eat you like birthday cake.” 

Dave cries out as you drag your tongue over him, move your lips against him, tease him with the pad of a finger. You take the time to swirl patterns over him: figure eights and asterisks and your own goddamn name. In that moment, holding him open and slowly working your tongue inside him, listening to him break for you, it occurs to you that this might be one of your more ingenious ideas. 

“Damn, babe, I love eating you out.”

“Ha, yeah, I–I think we established that.” It's almost painful, how hard he's trying to recover himself. “Like, 'Houston, prepare for liftoff: Bro Strider is gettin' his freak on in T-minus' – hey!”

Smacking his ass in a fit of exacerbation, you huff, “Jesus, can't you shut up and enjoy the ride? Here, I'll just...” You mean to go back to sucking him off, but a forceful hand meets your head and pushes you down.

“ _Really_ , don't stop.”

“Okay, but my knees are getting sore on this shitty carpet. Move.” You wait for Dave to make room, and you're met with a pleasant surprise when he gets on all fours. “Well look'it you.” You whistle. “You've done this before?” Sliding out of your pants, you position yourself behind him, his old bed much easier on the joints than the hard floor. 

“No,” he whispers into the sheets, and you're taken aback. 

In an attempt to lighten the mood, you tut. “Seventeen and never been rimmed – what a crying shame.” Holding onto his thighs, you brace yourself against him and take yourself to town, and you wonder if in another day, you can get him to do this for _your_ birthday.

“Dirk, fuck,” his voice splits your contemplative reverie, “put it in me again.”

Anxious to please, you oblige him, applying languid, slow circles until he gives. The pair of you moan in unison and you aren't sure if you want to laugh or cry. You should laugh because this is absurd; you should cry because you are eating out your kid brother. You settle for a contented hum instead, neither here nor there. He seems to like that, the humming, so you do it some more. Feeling generous, you bestow upon him a reacharound, jerking him arrhythmically. If anything, he seems to get off on the frantic pace, so your clumsiness is more than accounted for. 

He's practically doing lamaze into his pillow and that's all the warning you get before he cums, biting back the noise like it's some big secret. 

When he pulls himself together, Dave rips the sheet off the bed and replaces it, avoiding the wet spot conundrum altogether. He invites you back into his bed and asks you to stay, please stay, sleep here, and you can't refuse, don't even want to refuse, wouldn't dream of it. You finish yourself off and let Dave watch while he mumbles about all the stuff he wants you to do to him, slurring his words. 

You don't remember him turning the light out.

 

 

The last thing you see on the screen is Dave curling his arms around you and begging you not to leave before it goes dark and silent. It was the first time you blew him, and his first rimjob ever, and the little fucker had the audacity to tape it. To be fair, he probably hadn't anticipated the second half of the itinerary, but the point still stands that _Dave taped your first real moment of intimacy together_.

The irony of it – the pornographer who prefers not to be filmed – is too sweet not to savor, despite yourself. Of course, that's the thing about puppet masters: they like to pull the strings, not do the dance.

You're about to click on another one, your morbid curiosity chomping at the bit, when the door to the apartment creaks open. “I'm home early!” Dave calls, and for a moment, you panic. “Some twat ran his shitty SUV up a pole and the whole block went out –” 

You spin around just in time to meet Dave as he enters the room. 

“What are you doing?”

“Checking my mail, updating my blog, reading gay fanfiction.”

“Ew,” Dave deadpans, “delete your nasty pedo-puppet porn off my browser history right this instant.”

“Why do you always assume it's Muppets?” 

“Isn't it?”

“ _Never_ ,” you point at him. “Do you know nothing about sanctity?”

“Whatever.” Dave flops onto his bed and shuts his eyes, and from this angle, you can almost hazard a guess as to where his camera is probably still hidden.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welp, obligatory sex tape chapter, oops. Can't avoid it with Striders, I guess.


	6. A Bad Piece of Gristle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nothing says "I'm sorry" like a hot hunk of beef.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We were having too much fun, so I had to ruin everything.

 Tonight has been the night from Hell. Everything that could have gone wrong did, and then some. Dave failed to wake you up on time and your alarm didn't go off at all; you ran out of gasoline at an intersection _a few yards from a gas station_ ; the staff at the venue were a bunch of frigid, unhelpful pricks – with the exception of one cocktail waitress who was hellbent on corralling you into bed. Then, midway through setup, your cables cut out and you had to pull the spares – touchy bastards that, unless duct taped to the floor, would fail at the slightest movement. A third of your set was performed in triple-time because your software was on the fritz; you moved so fast that nobody was the wiser, but you could hardly enjoy yourself.

And really, the three frozen french fries in your number twelve were just the end of the rope, for you.

Your usual spot in front of the apartment building has been occupied by a garish yellow Mazda, but of course that isn't the worst of it: every other parking spot is taken for a quarter of a mile. You park seven blocks away and walk home, carting your equipment all by yourself because Dave probably left his phone off its charger for days on end again. The air is unreasonably crisp, the temperature having dropped into the mid thirties. It's been over a decade since you've seen snowfall in Houston, but tonight, you don't think a few flakes would be out of the question.

Sometime in the six hours you were gone, the elevator went to shit. So, you haul the sound equipment up each step, one by one. At the floor below yours, you discover the source of the static traffic jam. The apartment directly underneath your apartment is throwing one sicknasty bash, the bass thudding underfoot. 

When you finally get in the door, you're given all of ten seconds before Dave is there, hands restless and wanton over every inch of you. He mistakes your frustrated groan for desire. This is the worst possible scenario.

“Hey Dirk,” he purrs in your ear, and you'd like to get it up, but you just don't have it in you, not after tonight. “Wanna' give those rambunctious assholes downstairs a run for their money? Bet we can go louder _and_ longer.”

You push him gently away. “Yeah, not tonight, Prince Charming. I'm exhausted; I'm going to bed.”

But Dave doesn't let you off easy, following you into the bathroom and wrapping his arms around you from behind while you brush your teeth. He snuggles up to your back and curls his fingers around your belt. “If you let me fuck you tonight, I'll save you the effort.”

Abruptly, you spit into the sink. There's some blood in the citrusy globs of toothpaste. You check your gums. “I don't think so. It's three in the morning and my spine feels like it's going to collapse.” In the living room, you strip off your sweaty shirt. “What are you even still doing awake?”

Dave puts on his sweetest Southern Belle simper and says, “Why Mr. Strider, I do believe I was waitin' on your return.” Fanning himself with a hand, he adds, “I've been _up_ all night.”

“Well that's too bad, little missy, because this workhorse dropped the last shoe _hours_ ago.”

You rue the day you taught Dave to flashstep because one minute, he's halfway across the room and the next he's inches from you, sliding onto his knees, grabbing you by the hips. His fingers are working at your fly when you get around to shoving him off, and you've finally reached the end of your fuse. 

“Dave. Get. Off.”

“I'm trying,” he teases.

“ _Get out of my face, kid!_ ” You don't really yell – can count on one hand how many times you've yelled – but you do raise your voice at him. Your skin is prickling with agitation and your hair is standing on end and you feel like a soggy old dish rag and your shoulders ache and you really just want to go the fuck to sleep. 

“I'm not in your face, Bro.” Dave maybe meant for that to sound snide, but he's deflated with shock, his mouth hanging slightly open.

“Dave, I've had what you might call a rough night.” You're so pissed that your accent is slipping. “I got harassed at the light on Wheeler because _the truck ran out of gas_ , a chick at the club was literally one rejection away from mixing me a Stoli-Valium twist, and as if that wasn't enough, I had to switch out my cables because I strongly suspect you've been using my good ones even when I specifically requested you leave them the fuck alone.” Throughout this entire rant, you have been struggling with your pants, which might be comical if you weren't serious as hell. “Now, all of that could have been fine – I mean hey, shit happens, right? But then I come home to my shitty apartment in my shitty neighborhood and the shitty neighbors are throwing a goddamn blowout block party. Maybe you can find it in your heart to lay off for a night.”  
And alley-oop, you've done it. You are the worst. It is you. 

Dave gets to his feet. He stares at you in the bald glow of the streetlights, his face and hair saturated in sallow orange. Then he's gone, disappeared into the shadows without so much as a soft 'goodnight.' 

You crawl onto your couch, tired and sore and miserable. And no matter how you toss and turn the downstairs' music keeps you up until dawn, anyway.

You've only been asleep for a few hours when Dave gets up for school. You hear him lurch out of bed, and as he swears to himself all the way to the bathroom, you can imagine the way his lips move. You consider at length the way those lips feel on yours, the way Dave likes to kiss as if time has slowed down, like the world won't keep on rotating day in and day out if the two of you just stay locked in each other's arms. He's in the shower and you – fuzzy with those first irrational scraps of consciousness – contemplate several possible courses of action, all of which begin with you invading Dave's shower, and ending in orgasms and forgiveness. But as rational cognizance settles in for the day, you recognize these ploys as fantasies, lamenting the sad fact that none of them would yield the desired result.

Instead, you remain on the couch, pretending to be asleep while Dave putters around the apartment. The fact that he still makes the effort to be quiet breaks your heart. At some point, he wanders your way and looms over you, shielding your delicate eyes with his shadow. He just stands there, and you wonder if he can tell that you aren't really asleep. Your breathing is slow and measured, but calculated to be imprecise; your eyeballs flutter under their lids at exactly the right speed for simulating deep sleep; your jaw remains slack. As Dave stands over you, you wonder if he's going to wake you up, maybe even kiss you.

Not that you deserve it, and the universe assures you of this when Dave turns away and walks out of the apartment. 

 

You wake up again at around one-thirty in the afternoon. Your sleep was fitful and unsatisfying and you dreamed of Dave. Moving into the bathroom, you remind yourself that you had a disagreement, as couples are wont to do. The problem, of course, stems from the messiness of simultaneously belonging to Dave as a partner _and_ as a caretaker – a problem most couples do not have to confront. 

You get yourself dressed and freshen up with some cologne and sculpting paste. You're not going to meet Dave at school because you know he doesn't want you to. But you are going to apologize, and you are going to try and make him understand. 

In stark contrast with this morning, your street is deserted. All the cars have long since vanished and as you walk to your truck, you wish the worst kind of hangover on every one of those douchebags, your neighbors most of all. Honest to God, who throws a rager until five am on a Thursday? 

The grocery store is relatively vacant, just a few moms straggling through the aisles, picking up dinner before the family comes home. You pass a few kids around Dave's age, milling around the magazines and you hear them talking shit about other kids, trading inside jokes that will embarrass them in a few years' time. Dave doesn't talk about other kids period, with the exception of his online friends. You've spotted John and Rose through glimpses of Skype sessions over Dave's shoulder, but he's oddly conservative about his interactions with Jade. Mostly, he likes to theorize what it would be like to have John come spend a week or two at the apartment, or smack-talk Rose in his own parody of affection. He never smack-talks Jade and, apparently, she lives in the middle of the goddamn ocean. 

You buy some ground beef and some fresh rolls, and Dave's favorite cheese. There's still a few viable tomatoes in the fridge at home and you think there's even a head of lettuce in there somewhere. You're not very good with the whole verbal communication thing – it's not like you have even a half decent model – but, as the saying goes, the way to a man's heart is through his stomach, and nobody, not even the line cook at Tiffany's can best your burgers. 

Dave still isn't home by the time you return, and you wonder if he's stalling. You know for certain that he isn't scheduled to work this afternoon. To kill time, you fire up the grill, and leave a note on the kitchen counter:

 

_Kid,_

 

_Meet me on the roof._

 

When Dave finally turns up, the sun is sinking into the concrete mire of skyscrapers and radio towers, its iridescent tangerine glow suffocated by bulbous storm clouds. “Kind of late for a strife, isn't it Bro?” Dave rounds the corner of an air conditioning unit, katana in hand, but stops dead in his tracks upon seeing not a sword in your hand, but a spatula. You're flipping the burgers, concentrating on keeping Dave's well-done separate from your salmonella-rare. 

“Not here to fight you, Dave.” 

“Yeah, okay.” He shuffles back and forth for a moment, clearly out of his element. “Well then. I'll just, uh. Put this back.” Dave returns with a hoodie. He remains quiet while you set up shop on the rickety picnic table. At last, while you're putting the final fixings on a burger, he asks, “So, July during Christmas, huh?”

“Something like that.”

“Okay.” He dawdles, as uncomfortable as you are, but unwilling to back down. “Is this about last night?”

Now constructing your own culinary masterpiece, you answer curtly, “Very much so.” You pause, but Dave offers no reply. “See, last night – or, this morning, if you like – we experienced that age-old tribulation: the lover's quarrel. And don't roll your eyes at me, young man.” He's wearing his shades, but you can _feel_ the aura of disregard oozing out of his pores. “So anyway, these lovingly handcrafted patties of beefy goodness are my way of saying I'm sorry.”

Dave raises an eyebrow.

“I'm sorry for blowing up at you,” you sigh, “and I'm sorry for assuming you'd understand.”

“Well that's not a passive-aggressive jab or anything.”

“No, that's – wait.” You take a bite of your own burger and in the time it takes to chew and swallow, you've reformed your statement. “Dave, you're seventeen. You've dated all of three people before me.” Dave attempts to argue that point, but you interrupt him. “Casual sex does not constitute a relationship so stop right there. The point is, I remember seventeen. I remember what it's like navigating uncharted waters. I get it.”

“Don't talk to me like I'm a kid.”

“You _are_ a kid.” It turns your stomach sour to admit that aloud, and a heavy layer of guilt insulates your chest, constricting you from the inside out. “That's kind of the thing here, Dave. I'm still responsible for you. It's difficult to differentiate between the roles. It's complicated. It's messy. I don't always like it.”

Dave's mouth falls to one side. “Do not tell me you're giving me a break-up speech over fucking cheeseburgers.”

“What? No, fuck that. What I'm saying is that last night, I was tired and you were being seventeen and I didn't have what you wanted. Kid, sometimes you gotta' step back; a relationship is comprised of more than sex.”

Hunched over, staring at his half-demolished burger, Dave is crumpled in on himself. “I know that. I just, wanted you.” And, _oh_ , _that's_ what this is all about. Dave, like every teenager on the planet, doesn't get that no – at least, in that context – is not a rejection so much as it's rescheduling. He's afraid you don't want him anymore.

“Believe me, I wanted you, too, but I'd spent the whole night performing; I was dragging ass by the time I got home. And contrary to popular portrayal, sex is not a panacea – no proverbial snake oil will ease the pain of impending arthritis.”

Dave nudges your foot under the table with his. “Yeah, I guess.” He polishes off his dinner and then comes around to your side of the table and presses into your side. You throw an arm around him, squeezing him tightly. “So thanks for dinner, Bro.”

“My pleasure.”

“Wanna' watch a movie tonight?”

“Not if it's Tarantino.” 

“Damn.” He smirks into your shoulder and kisses it.

“We could always watch _Secretariat_ for the tenth time.”

“Thirteenth,” Dave corrects you, “and no. No, because you always cry, and damn it Bro, I am not running my ass to the store in this frigid tundra weather when you clean us out of tissues.”

“Fine, let's just curl up in bed and watch pirated anime.”

“Ah, ding ding ding,” he stands, picking up a plate to take to the kitchen. “Sounds like a plan, _aniki_.”

“Don't.” You smack him on the ass as you both retreat into the welcoming heat of the apartment, leaving the grill to stew until morning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize for the delay. Writing this was really difficult for no reason at all. I hope I conveyed my message, but that's kind of the thing about art: it's always up for interpretation.


	7. Photobomb

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's all about perspective.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Uggghhhh this whole chapter is just one big extended metaphor that got way out of my control.

 Dave is not your other half so much as he is your analogue; the two of you are counterparts, undeniably abstracted and yet bound together by parallels. You aren't sure where the divergence begins, but the endless, overlapping loop is suffocating; he is an interpretation of you and, in turn, you become an interpretation of his interpretation and so on.

For example, whereas you live the moment, Dave lives struggling to capture the moment. But he is nothing if not dogged, his persistence illustrated by an obsessive nine frames per second. He goes out for hours on end, knowing exactly what he wants despite lacking the capability to put a name to it. He leaves the house with his pack slung over one shoulder, tripod sticking out of one side. If pressed, you might estimate that Dave spends approximately thirty percent of his existence wrapped up in photography. Upon returning from one of his outings, he usually decompresses for an hour or two in front of the television before cloistering himself in his MacGyvered dark room for extended, unpredictable hours. His finished products – bizarrely lateral to his childhood scribbles – litter the apartment, constructing the illusion that the two of you live inside a poorly organized gallery.

You've never been invited on a single one of his excursions, and you never felt comfortable inviting yourself. Some people have hobbies, but Dave has passions, and this passion in particular strikes you as being very personal, private on a level that leaves no room for second parties. You're not the jealous type, but if photography were a woman, well, you might not be averse to checking his shirt collars for lipstick. More off-putting than his practice is his antipathy toward discussing it. When _you_ were his age, you'd talk the ear off of anyone who'd listen about the genius of your latest blueprint, the brilliance of your innovative engineering. But the most vivid expression Dave has ever offered was a glorified, unemphatic “Hell yes” that he muttered to himself, carrying some newly purchased media back to his room. For all his grandiose posturing, Dave is kind of lame. 

His photographs, though, are anything but. Dave has an eye for the unusual, and a talent for not alienating his audience with it. Your favorite picture is one he took from some obscure corner of Deering, probably after contorting himself into a tree. A crowd of tourists are clustered into a knot, and the focus is blurred, the only source of clarity in the dead center of a sculpture. The backs of heads and the Hawaiian shirts and farmer's tans are all disarranged in an unsettling snag. Dave speaks through hyperbolic color and irregular angles, and it has generated a language barrier that can't quite be crossed. 

Sifting through an array of photos on his makeshift desk, you come across one that stands out at you. It was developed in such a way that the color feels distilled and clean. Every shaft of light is exact and explicit, a corona profiling the subject as he is bent nearly in half, teeth bracing a thin sewing needle and – 

Oh. It's. You.

Your approach is different now, partisan. Now that you're looking at it this way, it feels wrong, like you've violated some unspoken pact. But you can't stop looking. It's chilling, the intimate vision this image suggests. For the first time, you think you see yourself the way Dave sees you.

Jesus, does your lip really curl like that when you're working?

There's another that catches your eye, also different from the rest. Black and white, almost no contrast, spectral and understated. It's a self-portrait, of sorts. Dave, naked, is propped up against his open window, the iron bars of the fire escape colliding inescapably with the shape of his narrow shoulders. A blush stains his skin in easy, changeable hues of gray. His neck is inclined, head resting against the swollen window frame. He left his shades on.

You wonder if this is how Dave sees himself. 

There is nothing inherently sexual about the piece. Sensual, perhaps, but that's just Dave. A touch of melancholy, a misery that doesn't belong in skin so young. His body is scored with thin scars, testaments to his many, many defeats – defeats he suffered at your hands. 

The pit of your stomach twists.

You're about to trace his parted lips with your thumb when the photograph is snatched right out of your hand. “Don't,” Dave scolds you, “you'll smudge it.”

You watch him slide it into a plastic page in a binder. He sits on his bed and looks out the window, and you look with him, imagining how many poses he tried, how many times he swore under his breath, ' _Just one more time, goddamn_ ,' how his perfectionist sensibilities must have tortured him through the whole experience. 

“I like that one.”

He smirks. “Yeah, I thought you might.” Kicking off his shoes, he lies back, stretching his arms until his fingertips brush his displaced pillows. “You can have it, if you want, when I'm done with it.”

Crawling onto the bed, you align yourself next to him, stroking his hair, touching his skin, tracing his chapped lips in real time. Parallels. 

“How was school?”

Dave grunts, leaning into your touch.

“Work?”

“Fine.” He faces you. “Sleep with me tonight.”

“Okay.” You don't grasp the context of his demand, not that you need to. You let him pull you in closer, bury his face in your chest. “Are you tired?” It's only nine o' clock, and his job at the record store is less than taxing, but sometimes, Dave gets into these exhausted moods. 

Leveraging himself with his arms around your neck, he speaks against your lips, “Not really.” He doesn't kiss you though, just sighs in your face. For a while you hold him the way you did when he was a child, rubbing your thumbs against his back. He throws a leg over your thigh, kisses your cheek, and you wonder if he used to daydream about this. 

He crashes into you, aggressive and insistent. He's all tongue and teeth tonight, his nails sinking into your shoulders. Your mind flits to the scars in that picture and you want to let him decimate you, let him get his revenge, although you doubt he'd see it that way. You lose your cool when he snakes his fingers into your hair and rakes his blunt nails over your scalp.

“Get undressed.”

All of a sudden, it's cold and he's gone, but you scramble out of your clothes; you practically throw them across the room. When Dave comes back, he's in the pair of shorts he left in the bathroom this morning. He takes off his shades and turns out the light. He climbs under the covers with you, blundering through the dark, hands slapping against your skin until he happens upon your bare hip and squeezes. 

He _laughs_. “What, did you think we were gonna' fuck?”

You shrug, glad that he can't see for shit in the dark because you can feel your ears burning up. 

He swings one leg over you, sits on your abdomen and grins. “I really just wanna' suck face, tonight.” And he does. Dave kisses you with the uninhibited carelessness of someone who is in love, which is paralyzing and beautiful in equal measure. Terrible things are packed into those kisses, tightly compressed and inaccessible, the stuff of nightmares. What you and he are doing here is inexcusable, but that's okay, you guess, since neither of you is making excuses.

Dave strays from your mouth, planting his kisses in your stubble, pausing to nibble on your jaw, trailing down your neck until he rests, humming into your shoulder. You bring your arms up and link them through his so that you can hold him closer. His breathing is shallow but even, and you fight against a strong current of painful nostalgia for a time when holding Dave was a simple inconvenience of life.

“Dirk.” You don't answer him, except to hold him tighter. “ _Dirk_.” He kisses you under your ear. He sucks the skin lightly, kind enough not to leave a bruise. Then he rolls off of you, huddles against your side, breathing you in. Your limbs are all tangled up and your left arm is starting to fall asleep, and you wonder if Dave will let you have it back. Instead, he hooks your ankles together and plasters himself to you.

“Why'd you color those pictures of us different?”

He snorts. “I washed you out as a metaphor for your repressed misanthropy.”

“Ha ha.” You elbow him right in the face and he grumbles angrily. “But really, I'm curious.”

Dave huffs and extricates himself from you, getting onto his belly and peering at you from between folded arms. “I don't know, man. I try not to over think it. I washed you out for the opposite reason I saturate my other subjects.” His voice is coarse with fatigue. “It's like...those people aren't real to me. They're projections. They're fucking construction sites.”

You suppose you can let him sleep, now that he's veering off into nonsensical surrealist territory. You're unable to sleep though. You are Dave's reality. But the reality is that you are his Labyrinth, his Daedalus, and his Minotaur all in the same shaky breath. 

Besides, if you are washed out and real, then what does that make the monochrome Dave in the photograph?


	8. Crime and Punishment

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stay in school and don't do drugs: a PSA.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is pretty important as far as I'm concerned; it was this idea that spawned the entire fic. I'd like to apologize for how long it took me to deliver this; Life™ happened and I had to clean up after it.

 Like most unpleasant surprises, it's something you are utterly unprepared for. While he has never been a particularly good kid, Dave has never been a particularly bad kid, either. Over the years, you've encountered your fair share of choleric administrative phone calls, angry letters from school – all requisite pitfalls of parenthood, you suppose. And you've never been terribly strict with him, because really, what would be the point? You recall with contempt the days when Dad used to box you round the ear and demand to know what you fucked up this time. Not in so many words – hardly in any words, in fact – but the message had always been clear: 

_Dirk, you fucked up. Why do you always fuck up?_

As such, your reaction to such tightened and incessant attempts to constrain you backfired miserably: the harder he tried, the deeper you entrenched yourself in trouble. For quite a while, your reputation was, put simply, _bad_. Fist fights and vandalism and substance abuse and, one time, juvenile hall. The harder the discipline, the harder the crime, and so on until you and your father had reached an impasse. 

Of course, a year later, Dave happened. You remember that phone call vividly. You were crashing at a friend's house and somehow, your father managed to get a hold of you. You remember the message more in tone than in words. Curt, stunted, sharp noises, only a few select words standing out in your memory: 'Mother,' 'misses you,' and, most of all, 'little brother.'

You couldn't make it to the hospital, so you'd just stood on the roof of your friend's shitty five-floor walk-up and smoked half a pack of cigarettes. Your parents – no doubt during a treaty reached with the shattering of no less than four plates and the squeaking of bed springs – had gotten themselves another kid. A son. You had a baby brother. And then, only a few months later, you found yourself an orphan and a parent all at once. But you can hardly begrudge Dave, since by no design of his own, he saved your life. Still, eighteen years later, it's difficult to remember details like that, when you're so angry that your blood feels as though it might sear you from the inside out. 

Dave called from work, said he'd been asked to cover the second shift so he wouldn't be home 'til nine, asked you to take care of a few things in his room for him. Well sure, fine, no problemo brochacho, whatever you need babe, have a nice shift, sayonara sweet cheeks. Dave's room, as it so often is, was a disaster area. But even amongst the debris of laundry (clean hardly distinguishable from dirty), weeks-old dishes, and general detritus, _you know a fucking piece when you see one_. 

It's sitting plain as day in the middle of his end table, accompanied conveniently by a lighter and – _Jesus_ , it's still packed. The aroma triggers a flood of memories, good, bad, and ugly. Immediately you delve into the night stand, and it's a straightforward task to find his bag. First drawer, not even hidden. You nearly tear it open and pinch out a paltry amount of weed and pack it into Dave's pipe. You light it experimentally, away from your face, and oh, fuck. It fizzles like a goddamn sparkler on the Fourth of July; a rancid, chemical smell burns your nostrils and you turn the fan on, letting the pipe smolder until it goes out.

You pace the apartment for a while, tense and internalized. Your skin feels too tight and your veins are throbbing; you're glad Dave isn't here because you're not sure you could restrain yourself in the event of a strife, and you'd be hard-pressed to explain away your blind rage on a family trip to the ER. 

Dave gets home long before nine and your mind – already teeming with suspicion – jumps to one enraging conclusion.

“Hey Dirk, you're never gonna' believe what happened at work tonight, man.” Dave is laughing and you're paranoid, analyzing his pitch, his cadence, searching for tell-tale anomalies. 

“Really,” you speak in a low, moderated timbre, each syllable carefully controlled. “Try me, Dave.”

Silence engulfs the apartment, unbroken and oppressive. Dave appears slowly, making his way over to the couch with the ersatz leisure of the damned. He may not know why, but he does know you are pissed. He feigns disinterest, badly, repeatedly casting nervous glances at you out of the sides of his shades. 

“Bro?”

“Go to your room.”

“But –!”

“ _Go_.”

It takes all of two minutes for Dave to notice that something is missing. He comes back into the living room, all coiled up from trying to disguise his vexation and ire. “Hey, Bro,” his voice is taut with the effort of maintaining a cool that was hardly present to begin with. “If you wanted to bake, you should've just asked. No need to be stealin' anyone's goddamn property. Shit be _hells_ of disrespectful.”

Oh, that's cute. 

“I didn't steal your piece, kid; I confiscated it.”

The laugh that falls out of Dave's mouth is cracked and uneven, awkward even for him. “Good one, Bro.” He crosses his arms and one of his feet starts beating against the carpet. “Very funny, but like for real, joke's over.”

When you accepted Dave as your own, it wasn't long before it dawned on you that you might have to have this conversation. Back then, it had gone a lot differently in your mind, ending with the two of you clam baking the sports car you thought you'd own by thirty. 

“I'm not joking. You're busted. You're _grounded_ , for that matter.”

“I'm _eighteen_ ,” he splutters.

“You're still in school. You know the rules.”

“Oh yeah,” Dave is tiptoeing precariously on the edge of the handle and you've got your score card at the ready. “Giving yourself jurisdiction over me until I graduate because you're scared I won't make it. Like I'd be dumb enough to drop out.” He's glaring at you when he says those words, and it stings your ego.

You could retaliate with something about how the only reason you didn't finish high school was because of him; that if you had done the sensible thing, you'd have graduated and gone on to become an engineering prodigy, maybe found a nice guy to settle down with – one who doesn't share strains of your DNA. That Dave would've grown up in some nice suburban paradise with a dog and a fence and the whole nine yards rather than inner city purgatory, fucking his brother. But instead, you simply say, “Well you sure were dumb enough to buy some tainted pot.”

Dave freezes and his mouth hangs open.

“Or did you do that on purpose?” you growl, “Because then, kid, you're _really_ up shit creek.”

“What?” He's stuck to the spot, and you guess that for now, this information has derailed his triple salchow off the handle. “No, I – _what_?”

“I said your shit is tainted, laced, it's been fucked with. Or did you not notice the little fire show every time you lit up?”

“I didn't know – I just thought –”

“What, you thought that was normal?” And suddenly, another thought pierces through your rage. “How long has this been going on?” 

Dave mumbles to himself, and you have to strain your ears to pick out, “Only a month.” 

“So that shit I pulled from your room, that's the only thing you've ever smoked?”

“Yeah.”

“Dave, where the fuck did you even get that?”

Dave shrugs, but stays where he is. “A kid at school; she got it from her brother.”

“Yeah, well you're cut off. You know, this is the type of bullshit I'd break up with someone over; easily the most impressive part is how you didn't even try to hide it from me.”

Dave's face reddens. “I thought you wouldn't care! You're always going on about how it should be legalized, how the government and the cartels are conspiring, the tax revenue, blah, blah, blah!”

You actually laugh because at this point, there's nothing else for it. “Yeah, and when it's legal, you can march yourself right on down to the head shop and buy a good, _clean_ , quality bag of weed. But until then,” you kick your feet up onto the coffee table, “it's a deal-breaker.”

You can practically see the steam rising out of his skin, he's so angry. You're waiting for his punchline, something like how you're such a hypocrite, this is a bunch of bullshit, the usual teenage near-sightedness. But instead, he hits you where it hurts.

“You're the worst, Bro.” 

Four little words that shouldn't matter, shouldn't carry any weight behind their hook. But all your fears and short-comings, your faults and your flaws are wrapped up nice and neat in that curt accusation. Funny, how in all of this, that's the thing that makes you snap.

Dave is almost to his door when you snatch him up and haul him over your shoulder. He beats on your back with balled fists and yells at you, 'What are you doing?' and 'No, no Bro don't!' and it's as if you have been thrust back through time to when Dave was just a little kid, caught stealing from your wallet or prank-dialing 911. 

“Bro, please, _no_!”

“Too late.” 

“I'm too old for this crap!” he shouts, voice shaking with fear.

“When you don't behave like a child, you'll be too old for it.” You sit down on the couch and pull him over your lap, and though he puts up a fight, it's futile and you both know it. His fingers curl into the couch cushion when the first smack is laid; he loses his breath and goes completely still under you. He hangs his head. His stomach is a plane of tense, unyielding muscle over your thighs and suddenly your déjà vu has been disassembled; Dave was never composed during a spanking. 

“You're not in trouble for smoking pot,” you smack him again, and he inhales, sharply through gritted teeth. “You're in trouble for doing something dangerous.” Another smack, another gasp, and when Dave pitches forward over your thighs –

 _Oh_.

You stop. Dave shifts in your lap, breathing irregular and heavy. You shove him away. Standing, you stretch, cracking your neck and grabbing the hoodie with your car keys. “Get online and tell your friends you're grounded. When I get back, the wifi will be on lock-down.”

“Where the hell are you going?” Dave's voice cracks, and you can see the tent that's formed in his jeans.

“To buy some cigarettes.” You slam the door on your way out. You could just as easily walk the two blocks to the Seven-Eleven, but you need a drive, and magnanimously, you're giving Dave some time to talk to his pals before you password-protect the internet. He spends so much time online that you suspect they'd file a Missing Person's after a few days of his absence. You crank your stereo and try not to speed as you navigate the roadway, one arm rested out the window, pounding out the beat of a song on the door. 

Somehow, over the last two years, you'd deluded yourself into believing nothing had changed, that you and Dave were still brothers, still just a guy and his kid. But no, you moron, the two of you are those things and then some. Dave is your kid brother, and your... Your what? Boyfriend? Lover? Neither of those monikers seems right, all incestuous connotations aside. You had hoped that you and Dave were in this together, but he's still plodding through the treacherous thicket of adolescence that you barely hedged in time, yourself. You want to be his partner, but that's a tough role to fill as long as you have to be his parent. And it isn't a simple matter of Dave turning eighteen, graduating high school; on some basic, instinctual level, Dave will always be your kid, as fucked up as that is. Transitioning out of your function as a parent was going to be difficult enough without the added complications of maintaining a romantic relationship, but this incident has thrown all of your carefully cultivated fallacies into sharp, undeniable relief. 

Maybe there's a reason this sort of thing is illegal. 

When you've cooled off enough to sustain civil human interaction, you pull into a gas station; two birds with one stone, you figure. After filling up, you go in and buy a whole box of lights – this isn't a one-pack problem. The cashier flirts with you; she's a sweet kid, shy, nice. Back in the truck, you tear off the end of the receipt where she penned her number and throw it, crumpled, into the foot well. 

You park in front of the apartment building and sit for a while. You smoke your first cigarette in almost a decade. The only light in Dave's window is the cold glare of a computer screen, and you wonder if he heard you park, if he's bidding his friends farewell. It's unfair, maybe, to cut him off from John, Jade, and Rose; they have nothing to do with this, but you feel that an element of punishment is necessary in this instance. 

Being a good parent means you have to be unfair, sometimes. 

Stepping out of the car, you stomp down the stub of your cigarette, grinding it into the pavement. On your floor, two arguments are taking place: in one apartment, there's a shrieking match between husband and wife – just down the hall, two kids can be heard fighting over the television remote; it sounds like it might come to blows. 

You're halfway through another cigarette, pruning the medicine cabinet when Dave ventures out to assess the situation. He has his shades on, and you're willing to stake a hundred dollars that he's been crying. He leans into the hard, warped embrace of the door frame and sighs.

“So, are you breaking up with me, or what.”

“No.” 

He visibly relaxes. 

“Am I still grounded?”

“Yes.”

He frowns. “For how long?”

“Indefinitely.”

He almost back-talks you, but seems to think better of it. “So what, no internet?” 

You shut the cabinet and face him, taking a weary drag and blowing smoke in his face. “No internet, and you come home right after school –”

“What about work?” he interrupts you, indignant. 

“You walk to work like normal, but I will pick you up. Also,” you pick his pocket in a flash, “no phone.”

“Bro, c'mon! That's not fair! What if I need it?” 

“Should've thought of that before you went and bought sketchy drugs from sketchy kids at school.” You move him and walk into the living room to sag on the futon. He follows you and perches on the arm rest. “Choices have consequences, man; you're getting off pretty easy, even if you don't think so. I wasn't kidding when I said I'd break up with someone over this. You're only getting pardoned because you're young, and this is your first offense.”

Dave's gaze is trained on the open window. “I didn't know,” he mumbles. Silence fills the space between you; you fiddle with the remote, but don't turn the TV on. Dave shifts on the arm rest but doesn't leave, and you don't know what he wants.

“What happens if we break up?”

His words take a long time to sink in, to make sense to you. You study him and debate the merits of lying to him. In the end, the truth wins out. “We behave like adults, or try to, at least. I try not to think about it too often.”

He grunts in and kicks the couch for a few minutes. 

“There isn't any chance I can bribe you to lighten my sentence with sex, is there?” he inquires hopefully. The barest bones of a smirk are flickering on his lips.

“Not even a little,” you tug him onto the couch next to you and put him in a headlock. “That's not how adults solve their problems, kiddo,” you scold him, giving him the most legendary of noogies. You let him escape when his scalp has been acceptably abused. He fusses with his hair, as if anyone but you is going to see him.

“I thought you said we only have to act like adults if we break up,” he points out.

You shrug. “Semantics.” 

Once Dave retreats back into his room, you pull his pipe out from where you squirreled it away and polish it up. You flushed his weed, but you figure you'll save this beauty in the event your vote ever ends up on the winning side and give it back to him as a celebratory gift. You stow it, along with his phone, in the one place he won't ever look; in the chest, with Cal. 

You hang around long enough to catch the nightly news and get marginally buzzed on some beer that was lurking in the back of the fridge before exhaustion hits you like a freight train. You have a nice little debate with yourself on whether or not you should join Dave in bed, but instead, you settle in for the night on the futon. You should have mentioned that his actions have consequences for _everybody._ You roll over and bury your head into your pillow, trying not to think about having to micromanage your boyfriend for the next month or so.


	9. Shadow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Missed connections.

 It has to be one of the hottest summers on record. The AC unit nosily handed in its letter of resignation an hour ago so you've been ambling through the apartment, losing your clothes. You'd peel off your skin if you could, if it would cool you off. 

Dave totters silently behind you like he always does. He doesn't command any of your attention for himself, just follows you around wherever you go. You don't particularly mind. He follows you into the bathroom, bumping into your legs when you stop to turn on the shower. He decides not to follow you in there, since the last time he attempted it, he got soap in his eyes. Dave hasn't yet grown into showers. But he closes the toilet lid and sits there to wait. Sometimes, you hear him humming to himself, a little off key just under the spigot's drizzle. Living so close like this, with him in your shadow, it used to bother you. But Dave is all you've got, and you're all that he's got, and it's just the two of you in this tiny nest in the whole big world so it's starting to feel comfortable, if not normal.

You're half-dressed when the phone rings. It spooks Dave and he jumps out of his skin where he's sitting on the floor, surrounded by the rubble of cheap toys. His eyes follow you as you answer the phone, and if you didn't know better, you'd say he's glaring at the intrusion. 

He isn't used to the phone yet; you're still getting a handle on paying your bills on time.

“Hello?”

“Strider?”

“Uh...yeah, speaking.”

“Hello, it's um, it's Jake?” He's an up-talker, and you're beginning to remember giving him your phone number. 

“Oh hey. See you finally called me.” You're careful not to let your smile show through your voice. You want to sound unimpressed, unattached. “So to what to I owe the pleasure?” You haven't gotten laid in almost a year and a half and god you need this. You need him to want you. And you think it might be nice if he decides to stick around, if Dave likes him enough.

You met him in the least romantic setting possible: with Dave, at the park. He was walking his dog – a massive, awful beast, all teeth and drool. But Jake was cute, all gangly, tan limbs and big perfect teeth set in a broad jaw... He's a few years your senior, just to your liking. 

“Well I was waiting for the opportune moment, I guess!” He's so goddamn emotive and it turns you on, translating it into guesstimates of how he'd be in bed... “And as it happens, opportunity has arisen!”

“Yeah, shoot.”

“I thought perhaps we'd do a day at the beach? Just you, me, and the adorable little tag-along?”

Oh. “I'll have to think about that.” It isn't that you don't want to bring Dave, exactly. It's more that you don't know how you feel about Dave and Jake sharing space, especially a space that contains you. As Dave weaves figure-eights through your legs, you try to imagine it, imagine sharing space with Dave and with Jake. And in an ideal world, it'd be perfect: spending the morning preparing French toast, dripping yolk everywhere, letting Dave crack the eggs gleefully over the rim of the bowl while Jake runs down to the corner store to get some syrup – the nasty, fake shit that Dave likes so much. Or maybe some night, the three of you could watch a movie; Dave would get bored and sleepy, and you'd tuck him in with a kiss on the forehead before returning to Jake, who would tuck _you_ into those toned, tanned arms and give you a hundred goodnight kisses, sloppy down your neck. You could go with Jake to the beach, and have a good time playing seahorse in the ocean, Dave riding on your shoulders, while Jake laughs and watches from the shoreline.

Except, in none of these scenarios are Jake and Dave sharing space with you. You've removed one of them from the equation, even if it's only at a surface level. They cannot conceivably share space in your brain, so how could you even begin to share space with them in real time? Three dimensions are three times harder to sustain than the singular, linear dimension of your imagination. And if it comes to a choice, you know who you will choose every. single. time. 

Dave teeters and giggles when you stop him with a big hand on his small shoulder. He clings to your leg, nuzzling the soft, secret place behind your knee. 

“You know what, how about just you and me take a day in the sun. I can get a sitter.” You ruffle Dave's hair and he tightens his hold on you, as if he's trying to get under your skin. “I don't think the kid is really ready for dates yet.” You chuckle at your own joke, but more at the broader, all-encompassing punchline of Dave being ready to share you with anyone. He guards you jealously, in his toddler way. You strongly suspect you won't get a chance at love until he hits puberty. 

Jake agrees, too sweet, too understanding of your predicament as a young parent. The two of you will go on your beach date, where he will tell you of how he spends his days caring for his ailing grandmother, how his parents are renown natural historians, prize-winning authors, and how he is but a lowly bio-chem major on his last leg of graduate school. You will tell him that your parents are dead but fail to mention that Dave is their kid. In fact, you will fail to tell him a lot of things about you or your life, instead choosing to elaborate the framework of your interest in robotics and engineering. This will fascinate him. 

Jake will presume that Dave is your son. And you will fail to correct him.

This will go on for some time. You will have exactly two and a half more dates with Jake before taking him to bed – at his place – and then it will go sour, the way it always does, because Dave will throw a tantrum. Because Dave does not like to share, and Dave does not play well with others.

Some night, you'll sit down to watch a movie, and Dave will climb in your lap and fall asleep. You won't move him, even when your legs go numb. But you will kiss him gently on the ear and whisper, “Goodnight, you little shit,” and hold him against your chest until the credits roll. 

In the morning, Dave will help you make French toast, and a few pieces will burn because you'll forget to turn the griddle off before dashing to the store for a small bottle of Mrs. Buttersworth.

 

 

This morning, you wake up naked, sore, and very, very satisfied. Your senses come back to you slowly; the clusterfuck fray of hoarse crowing and the incessant _clacking_ of talons on iron bars tells you that Dave has already fed the birds. The bathroom sink is running and the pipes groan with effort. You snuggle deeper into the pillows, soused in the scent of him: sweat and musk and expensive cologne. Flashes of the night before burst across the front of your mind – Dave's hands wandering along your body, chaotic and indiscriminate; Dave's lips, connecting with your spine, his teeth scraping notches into your skin, not kissing you as much as gorging himself on you; Dave's voice, talking – always talking, spinning tender threads of belied prose about how much he loves your body, loves the way you move with him...all poetic bullshit, all completely Dave.

He's an attentive lover and a decent top, once he's coerced into it.

You roll onto your back and groan; a dull ache spiderwebs through your hips and thighs, extending into your tired knees. You'll probably have to take some leftover painkillers, but riding Dave for forty-five minutes was more than worth it.

Staggering into the bathroom, you find that Dave has occupied the sink, foaming at the mouth with citrusy toothpaste. You stand too close behind him and reach over his shoulder for the medicine cabinet. You pop two Vicodin and swallow dry. Dave glances at you through the mirror, but doesn't comment. He looks exhausted. He goes rigid and spits his mouthwash prematurely when you rest your chin on his shoulder and sling an arm across his belly. 

“You were so good last night,” you grin into his neck and kiss him. You're angling for positive reinforcement, hoping he'll top you again and more often. “Thought I was gonna' cum when you were fingering me. Oh man, and that _thing_ you did with your _tongue_ –” 

“Yeah, what else is new?” He's being cagey, but you like that you can still make him nervous. 

Boxing him in against the cold porcelain with your naked body, arms on either side of him, you hum, and you want it to rumble through him, want it to shake him from the inside out the way he shook you. “One of these days, babe, I'm gonna' fuck you so hard against this sink,” you pause to nibble just below his ear, “we'll be evicted for property damage.”

Dave gasps when you grope him through his boxers before disappearing back into the bedroom. You catch the tail end of him telling you to think about your security deposit, but it's deflated, lacking the necessary bite. 

Cocooned in the sheets, you recline and watch Dave get dressed. He trades the boxers for something more snug, giving you a calculated show of ass, like that will somehow avenge his honor after your assault in the bathroom. He slips on the first pair of jeans he picks up, but parades through six different shirts before settling on some plain, white tee shirt. 

“I liked the other one,” you offer helpfully, “the one with the print.”

Dave snorts. “Sure, but not paired with this,” he throws on a fitted charcoal suit jacket. “The graphic-tee-with-blazer thing is too art school douchebag for my taste.” 

“Oh, so you have taste now?” you laugh.

“Shut up.” 

While Dave selects a pair of shoes from his impressive collection, you start to work yourself up in your hand. Dave is never merely dressed, but likes to be put-together, and he looks damn good. 

“Hey, play hooky like a normal teenager, just for a day.”

Dave frowns at you over his shoulder. “I have like three tests today.”

“Take 'em on Monday; I'll even call in for you, tell 'em you can't get out of bed.” Giving him an obscene once-over, you add, “It'll be true by the time I'm finished with you.”

He rolls his eyes. “Unbelievable. What's gotten into you?”

In a flash, you're pulling him on top of you, soft cotton and rough denim – all texture on your bare skin. “ _You_ got into me, last night.”

He turns an adorably garish red under the collar. “So what's this, the sequel?”

“Kid, I've got a six-pack of Red Bull and the power to put you under house-arrest; this ain't the sequel, this is payback.”

“Jesus, Bro,” he moans, rutting against you. His jeans aren't terribly pleasant, but you appreciate the enthusiasm. 

“Stay home with me and you can call me that while we fuck.” You're pretty sure that's the highest chip in your arsenal, the biggest incentive to bet. 

He puts his mouth on your mouth in a hard, unforgiving gesture that can't really pass for a kiss. Your arms come around him and hold him close and you spread yourself out beneath him, an offering of sacrifice. He breathes in your breath and returns it to you, lips lingering around yours, bumping against your jaw. He clamps his thighs around your hips and braces himself against you, pushes his fingers through your dirty hair. 

You smile for him.

“I have to go now,” he murmurs.

Your smile breaks.

“I have to, Dirk. It's the home stretch. I'm almost there. I have to.”

A cold, hard knot settles in your belly, forged from bitter guilt. You've known worse, though. “Alright, well...let me just throw something on. I want to take you to school.”

He slides his shades onto his face and you can't see his eyes. “Okay.”

Dave does not like the truck anymore. You have conflicting feelings about this development. You can't put an exact date to the day he decided it was embarrassing, and you suppose there is no exact date. The shift was gradual, an avalanche in slow motion, culminating in the realization that what he'd perceived as an ironic trophy was, in fact, just a practical reality. Dave has never been much for practical realities. 

When you pull up in front of the high school, you are overcome with a peculiar rush of emotion. Dave steps out of the cab and hops onto the pavement. You watch him for a while, even as he is swallowed up by the throngs of students loitering around the yard. 

You're about to pull away when someone catches your eye. He is tall and broad and dark – quite handsome, in his way. He's probably older than you, his hair flecked with gray. He's standing beside a pretty, soft-cheeked woman who is waving at someone in the crowd – their child, more likely than not. There is something puzzlingly familiar about the shape of his face, and you fixate on him for far too long; he notices you. He _recognizes_ you, if the sudden light in his bespectacled eyes is any indication. But it is fleeting and he looks away as if burned.

You forget about him by the time you've reached the first intersection, not unlike how you forgot him fourteen years ago. You go home and wait for Dave.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let us all now take a moment to applaud dysfunctional isolated relationships.


	10. Graduation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Oh, the places you'll go.

 Even from your vantage point at the back of the bleachers, you can see Dave shifting from side to side. He is bored. You cannot fathom how the kid can be bored at his own high school graduation, but there he is, eyes hollow, lips pursed. Then again, you never had to go to marching practice or sit through rehearsal after rehearsal. But you refuse to feel bad about your attempts to live vicariously. 

Dave is one in a class of five hundred, so the ceremony portion of the program is relatively short; the principle welcomes the families and friends, followed shortly by the chairman of the board of trustees and his cornball speech, condensed into a very cheesy three and a half minutes. You're oddly grateful that Dave is not Valedictorian, because you _know_ what kind of horseshit he'd try to pull with a dais and a large crowd at his disposal. He still tries to pull some horseshit, although the popping of his bubblegum goes largely unnoticed. 

When it's his turn, when the principle begrudgingly calls “David Elizabeth Strider” and you guffaw with several thousand other people, Dave strides coolly across the stage, blatantly ignoring the standard pace at which his classmates marched. Seemingly from out of thin air, he produces a pair of shades and dons them as he approaches the staunch, very miffed looking man whom he's addressed with countless insincere terms of authority. Flashes go off like lightning as Dave grabs the administrator's hand and shakes, nabbing his diploma and posing in a grotesque pastiche of the tried and true. He blows a bulbous, fuchsia bubble right as a camera goes off. When he's finished, he pulls his principle into a one-armed hug and sends himself off with a last salutation. Whatever it was, it leaves the man looking stunned.

After the ceremony, you wait for Dave to find you, rather than suffocate yourself in the clogged gymnasium; he comes bounding up the bleachers, John and Rose in tow. This is the first time you've met them in person, and it's amazing the difference three dimensions can make. John shakes your hand vigorously, and he has quite a grip for a guy who looks like he's built out of toothpicks. Rose blushes when you take her hand and kiss it, delivering a patented 'Enchanted I'm sure' just for good measure.

You turn to Dave, who practically has his face pressed against the screen of his iPhone. He's speaking at it, but amongst the noise of the gradually thinning mob, you can't even make out one word of it. It's only when you punch him in the shoulder that he remembers his manners.

“Oh, hey. Jade, you remember Bro.” He turns the phone around so that you are face to face with a digital iteration of a tan, bright-faced girl with big eyes the color of celery. She is grinning from ear to ear and waving frantically. 

“Hi again, Mr. Strider!” She concedes to call you 'Bro' and says she knows how proud you must be of Dave, and her earnest joy inflates the swell in your chest to ten times its original size. You tell her she couldn't be more right, and Dave quickly pawns the phone off on John when things threaten to get too mushy. 

It's a shame. You're rather fond of Jade.

Out in the parking lot, after the four of you figure out last-minute the meet-up strategy for dinner, Dave corners you. He waits until John and Rose have piled back into their rental and are navigating the crammed lot and then slams you against the truck. He throws himself on you and kisses you hard; you push him off and look frantically around, searching for any bystanders. It's dark and people are mostly preoccupied with traffic and reminiscence and capturing their Kodak moments, but that hardly quells the surge of panic threatening to break your chest open. 

“Dave!”

“Oh come on, Bro, nobody even cares.”

“There are cops literally on the other side of the street. Let's not push our luck.”

Dave groans and plants a kiss on your cheek before getting into the truck. 

You interrogate him on the way to the pizza place, demanding to know what was up with his sudden display of affection. He shrugs.

“We won't be able to do anything while John and Rose are here,” he reminds you. “I just wanted to get it out of my system.” There's an undercurrent of soft anguish in his monotone drawl, and that familiar friend, guilt, washes over you like a cold ocean tide. For a moment, you are horrified by the question of whether or not he's told any of his friends about you; if you were a betting man, you'd put your money on Jade. But then, Dave isn't an idiot, and he values his friends too much to jeopardize their friendship, and he values you too much to jeopardize the relationship. 

The guilt folds itself into a new shape and you feel even worse, knowing that Dave can never share this part of his life with anyone for fear of retribution. There will never be questions like “When's the wedding?” Instead, there will only be “Dave, when are you going to move out of your brother's place?”

As if you haven't taken enough away from him by being what you are.

When you have three extra large pepperoni pizzas steaming in the back seat, you make your way back to the apartment taking a circuitous route, avoiding the rush. You've been keeping the big secret for two days now, and you aren't meant to tell him until Rose and John go home, but it's been eating away at you and you _need_ to say something that will make you feel better.

“Hey kid, I got you a graduation present.”

“Aw man, can I open it when we get home? Or, wait, no, I bet it's something deviant; even I can't explain that away with irony. Goddamn it, Bro.”

“No, get your ass out of the gutter and listen up.” Another car cuts you off only to turn at the next intersection and you curse under your breath. “Those five places we looked at last week?”

“Yeah?”

“And you told me to just pick one?”

“Uh-huh?”

“I picked one.”

There is a bloated moment of silence as this information sinks in, and Dave faces the road. Finally, after three stoplights and a drunk pedestrian, he says, “We're gonna' have a place together.”

“That's right,” you smirk. 

Dave first brought the subject up four months ago, concerned in that adult way that only eighteen-year-olds are. He asked you what would happen, when he graduated. Obviously, he didn't plan on leaving – going so far as to enroll at the University of Houston when easily could've been accepted at another school. But he persisted until you came to an agreement: in the spirit of moving up in life, the two of you would get a place together – like, really together. Split the cost, share a bedroom, the whole nine yards. No more sleeping on the couch (except for after a lover's tiff, naturally), no more his and his, just yours, in the plural sense. 

“I know you hate this place,” Dave says when you pull up to the curb. 

“I don't hate it,” you lie.

Dave knows you're lying, but doesn't bother calling you out. Instead, he goes around to the back and picks up the stack of pizza boxes. You try to help, but he tells you he's going to need you to get the doors. John and Rose are already there, and you forget for a moment that Dave gave them his key. 

It's odd, watching Dave and his friends interact in real time. To see him and John touch, pushing and shoving and slapping and pinching; to see him and Rose skirt around each other, like they are similar poles – it's a little unnerving to watch, Dave's fingers on someone else's skin, Dave's head resting on someone else's shoulder. Even the way he speaks with them is different: he is ostentatious, full of a false inflation of his own ego. 

“Okay, kids, move it along. Party's not over, just need to relocate.” At eleven o' clock you pry them from the couch so that you can go to bed. There is a collective whine about this turn of events, but a man's gotta' sleep. You almost went to Dave's room out of habit, but that would be sort of difficult to explain, particularly halfway into the night when you'd instinctively spoon him.

Your closeness puzzles Dave's friends, and you know it. To you, even the most platonic gesture of affection leaves expressions of nonplussed confusion on both faces. You gather from what little Dave has probably told them about you, they've likely painted a picture in their heads of this bizarre man whose focus was more puppet-ward than Dave-ward, which has rarely been the case save for times of extreme poverty. Rose in particular seems baffled by your casual banter back and forth, the ease with which you razz one another. 

Your fear that Dave might have let the cat out of the bag is dashed, at least. 

Fading in and out of sleep, you turn over and over, barrel-rolling on the cramped couch. Sometimes your dreams linger, clinging to the heels of consciousness as you fumble through the dark. The kids' voices carry down the small hallway and haunt you even in sleep. Dave does not laugh like that with you. He doesn't speak so blithely, never as loose with his words or his ego. 

When you still haven't surrendered to deep sleep, you get up and move to your work table. The kids must be asleep because apart from the soft echo of Dave's television, there is no noise: no dry commentary or snide remarks, no callow giggle fits or recycled insults. You pull out a drawer of scrapped projects. You've only held onto one of them. You haven't worked on it in fifteen years. 

It is a small, single USB drive, containing the bare bones of a program that began as a means of amusement, a way to pass the time. But for no reason at all, you've been thinking about revisiting the concept, maybe building a few circuit boards and taking it seriously. The idea is intriguing to you still, and you know you have the capacity to finish it.

While the program is still converting, Dave comes up behind you, sleepy-eyed and tousle-haired. “What're you doin' up?” he yawns, stretching.

“Nothing really. What about you, sleeping beauty?”

Dave snorts. “Well, I could say I just came out for a glass of water and let this scenario degenerate slowly downward into an ugly, bromidic porno, or I could just cut to the chase.” He locks your head against his chest and kisses your hair. His fingers rub against the bristly grain of your stubble as he strokes your face, and you get lost in his heartbeat. 

Before your brain can really connect with your mouth properly, you blurt, “Wanna' go see the new place?” 

Dave lets go. “You bought it already?”

Shrugging, you stand up and crack your back. “Just wanted to get it done and over with. You can pay what you owe me whenever.” And that is definitely the parent in you talking; in any other circumstance, if a boyfriend couldn't split the bill, you'd spot the red flag from a mile away. But this is different; this is Dave. 

“Okay, yeah, I guess.”

Tossing a shirt at him, you slip on your shoes. “Okay yeah you guess, fuck you. You're excited as hell.” You hope the accusation rings true as you dig the new key out of the drawer you squirreled it in. It's still in the little plastic baggie and feels foreign to you. 

The drive across town is long and the cityscape outside transforms in careful gradation: chain link fences evolve into chipped wooden planks, which eventually contort into hand-crafted iron bars that contain fastidiously maintained shrubs. The buildings stop being vinyl siding and start being brick; brick gives way to brownstone and after a while, you are deep in a dense forest of concrete and granite and reinforced steel. 

Dave's head is pressed to the window; he looks half-asleep. 

You stop outside the building, and park. You look to Dave, who is shifting in the seat, eyes following the rise of the building's face, an interlocking tessellation of glass and sandstone. 

Pulling the key from your pocket, you murmur, “Let's go in.” 

A young lady in a suit is sitting at the marble desk inside. She flashes the two of you a slight smile, wispy from working the graveyard shift, no doubt. You can sympathize, deeply. You just show her your key and your ID; she checks you in and you drag Dave into the elevator – the working elevator with gleaming brass doors. The walls are paneled and the carpet is nice and it doesn't smell like spilled beer or stale tobacco. 

“Do you wanna' press the button, Dave?” you tease him.

“Shut the fuck up,” he sneers. “Which floor are we again?” 

The hall is dim, just a few low lamps lighting the way through the narrow, dark passage; polished furniture lines the walls, which are a deep shade of red. The door – your door – unlocks with a muted _click_ and swings open on silent hinges. Dave steps in after you. 

The place looks different now than it did in the saturated light of day. Without the spiel of the realtor spouting uninterrupted, the deluge of sunbeams and dust motes, the rooms suddenly seem too big and almost ethereal. Kaleidoscopic rays filter in through the tall windows, an amalgam of city lights – neon and billboard and traffic stops – diluted by a waxing moon like light through a prism. The hardwood floors are sleek and shiny, cool under your feet when you toe off your shoes. 

The floorboards creak in new and unexpected places when Dave walks across the kitchen and into the living room. He stands alone in front of the north wall, a dark silhouette, a shadow in a world of black and blue. 

“I like it,” he says. “I'm glad you picked this one.” After that, he clams up and ghosts around the empty apartment. You follow him down the hall, past the laundry closet, past the second bathroom – _second bathroom, wow_ – and into the master bedroom. You've shared a bedroom before. You share one now, sort of. While Dave explores, you stand still, contemplating the nature of consolidating yourselves into one room. You imagine sharing drawers and shelves, imagine the look of Dave's things cluttered amongst yours on a bureau. There is a walk-in, and you can't help but smile, anticipating the small battle that will undoubtedly ensue over closet space, even though you already know who will win. 

“Bro! Check it! I forgot about the bath tub!”

God, he sounds so young. He _is_ young, you remember, but try not to dwell on that for too long. At least, not the way you used to. 

 

 

It's funny, the way the world refuses to freeze when you freeze. Time moves on, tenacious and inevitable, while you are paralyzed in the abused arch of Dave's door. The TV is on in the living room; the blender hums loudly from the kitchen; a siren blares in the distance and jack hammers pound incessantly at the concrete only a block away. Dave appears behind you and pushes you aside and if you were a weaker creature, you might jump right our of your skin; the sensation is there all the same, clogging your synapses, never quite making it through nerve endings as a command. 

Holding out his cerise concoction of adulterated dairy, Dave asks, “Want some?” He is smirking at you, inscrutable for the first time in sixteen years. There is a runnel of sweat dripping down the back of your neck that has almost nothing to do with the cruel hundred-and-two degrees Fahrenheit that has permeated Houston. 

“No thanks.” He knows you don't like strawberry, and you almost want to think the gesture was some sort of mind game, but that seems preposterous. You dump yourself in Dave's spinney chair, backwards, and rest your chin on the back; it's loose and wiggles uncomfortably. 

Dave slurps his milkshake and you can see from the twinkle in his eyes that he is barely restraining himself, one Kelis joke away from shattering your trepidation to smithereens. But he isn't going to do it. He's just gonna' let it linger, let it fester, polluting the air.

Your incestuous sexual tension is a plague you don't know how to stamp out.

“Wanna' watch a movie?” he asks around the straw in his teeth.

You dither, debating with yourself in a seamless stream of self-defeating loops, but Dave's room is the coolest in the apartment, so that pretty much decides the match. “Yeah, okay.” 

“I don't know what's in there,” he informs you as you jostle him, moving onto his bed, “but whatever.”

You want to call bullshit; the little jackass probably planted something that will only ratchet up the uneasiness, worsening your apprehension... It turns out to be _Fight Club_. The afternoon stretches on and on, and you aren't watching the movie as much as you're just existing in the small space of the single bedroom. Jesus Christ, it feels like it wasn't all that long ago that this was _your_ room, that there was a time when this was your bed where you used to read Dave his bedtime stories, sing him to sleep in the key of it's-after-two-am- _please-I-work-in-three-hours_. 

Dave reaches behind himself and finds your hand, encloses it in his own, pulls you closer until your arm is around his waist. He plays with you and leans back into your chest. Your blood pressure spikes and you're pretty sure you've just been condemned to a heart attack at thirty-four. Normally you're quick to get into bed with a new boyfriend, but Dave is _sixteen_ and sure, he's claimed to have had sex, but who even knows if that's really true – although some awkward, proud parent part of you hopes that it is – though only if he was being responsible – oh God, oh _God_...

You and Dave have kissed seven times since the night he was sick. Seven times in three weeks would seem sparse and emaciating in any other circumstance, but you've kept careful record of every incident, able to recall with perfect detail each and every time. Seven seems like too much, scary and overdrawn.

But Dave, lips pink from his milkshake, a cool reprieve in this unlikely heatwave, appears to be gunning for an eighth.

It is so nice to be wanted. You've been alone – in that respect, at least – for a very long time, and it is excruciating and exquisite to be so transparently _wanted_. Dave loves you, really, really loves you, utterly and completely. And you love him, too, though perhaps not in the exact way he'd like. But you like the idea of loving him that way, and you could shoot yourself for it. But somewhere deep inside, you are still a selfish kid, stunted by the paradox of responsibility. Funny how growing up fast has a curious way of making you into a perpetual child.

Whatever happens from here on out, though, your swear to yourself only to do as right by Dave as possible, despite this monumental lapse in judgment. 

 

 

Dave's arms are coiled around your neck, the two of you twisted up in one another on the floor. He strays from the kiss, straining for breath, panting hotly against your face with his three-am-breath, but you don't even care, you're so in love with him. Groaning, your gaze travels down his neck and across his jaw; you've lost your mind, the hideous, violently purple bruises there a testament to your absolute insanity. 

“Shit, shit, _shit_ ,” you murmur, grazing them with your fingertips. 

“Oh, God,” Dave laughs, shaky and disenchanted with himself. 

“Shit, what have I done?”

“Dirk.” He presses you against him, foreheads touching, noses bumping, lips pushing and pulling. “Dirk, it's okay.”

“John, Rose, though –”

“Please don't mention them right now, you gigantic dick.” Squirming in your lap, he tightens his arms and you wonder if he will save you the mortification by severing your spinal cord. What a courtesy that would be. “I can hide it,” he promises in your ear, “just don't take your mouth off of me.”

“ _Dave_.” You fall back onto the hard floor, cold and bereft under your back. Tonight will seep into this floor, get stuck in the grain to become a specter, ever present in the background of life's chronic routine. “ _Dave, Dave, please_ ,” you've lost all agency of your mouth, unaided by the disordered jumble your mind has melted into. Your brother's kisses are hot, hot turmoil and you don't even care if you get burned.

He's hard and you're hard but you aren't going to do this, not here, not yet. Not like this, spread out in an empty room with big, bare windows. When he starts to nibble on your neck, you push him away. “No man, can't. Can't let you get carried away, we can't both show up looking like the sole survivors of the killer leech invasion.”

Dave spits a little when he laughs at that, spattering your neck. “Fine.” Rolling off of you, he curls up in the crook of your arm, sighing, catching up with himself. One of his hands finds its way into your shirt and he strokes your abdomen. You nuzzle the top of his head, his soft, fine hair tickling you. Dave has your mother's hair; yours is fine too, but coarse, like your father's. 

“I can't wait to fuck you with the lights on in here,” he whispers.

You bark out a harsh parody of laughter. “How romantic.”

“Or, you know, jerk off while you bury your nose in your stupid dystopic sci-fi novels.”

“I love you.”

When you finally get around to moving, scraping yourselves up off the floor, Dave examines the damage in his reflection in the window. His face betrays him more than you'd ever let on, and he looks concerned. Still, he insists that he's covered up worse, which turns your stomach a little.

It's a little after four-thirty when you both creep quietly back into your shit hole apartment, chuckling about some insular, truly unfunny dick jokes. Besieged by a sudden wave of exhaustion, you pass out on the couch while Dave goes to the bathroom to unearth a scarcely touched tube of cover-up. 

The volume on your laptop is muted, so you don't hear it when that old program finishes converting, having forgotten it entirely. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, this is it: this story is officially half-finished. It feels like it is starting to blow up a little bit. Thanks everyone for your encouraging feedback and for taking the time to let me know how I'm doing. I hope the next half lives up to the expectations I seem to have cultivated.


	11. Thicker Than Water

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Family is what you make of it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Am I twisting the knife hard enough or what.

 “You know,” Rose leans casually over the back of the sofa, “you're not at all the shape of the aberrant mold Dave has carved of you.” Her graceful lips are turned up at the corners, fixed in a soft facsimile of a smile.

“That is the most passive aggressive complement I've ever received, thank you.” You're sprawled across the couch while John and Dave sit below, the madcap clicking of buttons imbued with swears and insults until it becomes a refrain, an ode to friendly rivalry.

“Apologies; I didn't mean it that way.” She slips over the sofa and curls into the remaining corner like a cat.

“What, like passive aggressive or like a complement?” you ask.

She grins, calculated and mystifying, and you push her good-naturedly with your foot.

“Don't listen to Rose,” Dave mutters from the floor, “she's nothing but psychopathy and treachery.”

You swat him playfully around the head and John gets in an easy hit. “Outrageous,” you scold, “I thought I raised you better; that is not how you speak of a lady, Dave.”

“She's not a lady, she's a praying mantis.” He lets out an anguished wail as John's plasma grenade goes off and the game ends.

Rose turns to you with her cool voice and says, “At least I'd do you the courtesy of some choice coitus before biting your head off.”

“Kinky,” you wink at her, and Dave groans. John collects his cash and surrenders the controller so you can serve your baby bro with a steaming second helping of whoop-ass.

It's the last day of the visit, and a misty composite of comfortable sorrow has settled over the apartment. For the most part, it's been a fucking delight having them here; John brought with him an exotic sense of normalcy, while Rose fell into place like a puzzle piece, some long-lost relative uprooted by the improbabilities Occam's Razor tells you to reject. But, John and Rose are also foreigners, of a sort. Foreigners in a world of fixtures, from the towering pile of pizza boxes to the week-old dishes in the sink to the way Dave's toothbrush rests alongside yours in the cup, almost touching. That's you and Dave for the duration of the visit, really: almost touching. Skirting around one another, hyper-aware of each brush of fingers, every gaze that lingers too long. This weekend has forced you to reevaluate what is conventional and what falls within the margin for error. Sometimes, the two of you estimate too widely, like Dave using the bathroom while you towel off in front of him. The stunned and somewhat perturbed expressions that resulted from the two of you emerging together exposed exactly how far from conventional you've veered.

Dave elbows you in the side and you hiss. John only bested him with the aid of your antagonism, but Dave doesn't stand much in the way of a snowball's soggy chance against you, and he knows it. Retaliation isn't the only option, but of all the names people have called you, 'pacifist' is not among them. You grab his wrist and derail what might have had the potential to be a kill shot, only for him to pinch you in the back so that you nearly drop the controller. Grabbing and pinching quickly dissolves into slapping and punching, and before anyone can get so much as a gamble in edgewise, the pair of you are rolling around on the floor, game forgotten, until you've pinned Dave with your considerable weight advantage.

Then you spring the trap.

“Bro! Bro stop! Oh, God!” He's convulsing under you on the floor, arms flailing, shaking and on the verge of tears. Your hands shimmy up his sides, fingers fluttering like so many curious insects, tickling him relentlessly.

“Not until you surrender,” you sing-song.

“My ribs are gonna' break!” he screams.

“We have insurance.”

“I'm gonna' cry!” he shrieks, and indeed, his eyes are welling up.

“Adorable.”

“ _Bro I am going to piss_!”

You pause, still astride him while he heaves, oxygen-starved and cross-eyed. “We're moving in two weeks, I don't give a fuck,” you conclude, then descend upon him once again. It isn't until he's kicking and scarlet in the face that he finally, finally submits to you and all bets are off. He just lies there for a while, waiting for his breath to catch up, presumably checking to make sure all his vital organs are still intact.

“If I'm not mistaken,” Rose chimes from her perch, “I believe, as the saying goes, 'you just got served.'” Her pretty face is split with a grin and the two of you share a high five. John is failing miserably at containing his laughter behind a hand; it spills out through the cracks of his fingers, accentuating Dave's humiliating defeat.

“Okay, lil' man,” you address him once he's upright, “pay up.”

He slumps against the futon. “John robbed me blind in that last round; sorry, dude.”

You quirk an eyebrow.

“You _can't_ be serious,” Dave deadpans.

“Serious as bowel cancer.”

“Ugh, fine, how about an IOU.”

“Accepted, on the condition that I can redeem it at my convenience,” you smirk. You long to go to him in his bed tonight, to sleep beside him, on top of him, wherever he will let you. You can't wait to curl up with him on the couch and watch shitty reality television while you fight over a bag of Doritos and make snide remarks about people with bad tans and worse life decisions.

Dave is sad to see his friends go, and it is contagious. On the drive to the airport, the whole car feels still and nobody really speaks. Dave leaves the radio off. You all glance at one another through reflections in windows, like a distorted, cramped fun-house. A peculiar, incomprehensible finality percolates under the choking heat and the roar of the city. Houston is a living, breathing animal, and you suspect that if Rose or John ever tried to stay here, it would eat them alive.

You send John off with a fist-bump, and Rose with smile, your fingers through her hair. You tell them both to take care. You hope you'll see them again, but you don't say it, don't really know how. Dave doesn't let them depart without saying what you cannot, and you are proud of him and of yourself; you must've done something right.

When it's just the two of you in the car, you ask him if he wants to grab a bite to eat.

“No,” he tells you, a dry, even melancholy propping up his voice. “There's still some of that Lo Mein in the fridge.” But when you arrive home, Dave does not go to the fridge. Instead, he goes directly to his room, and you are left with the distinct feeling that he wants to be alone. So, you arrange yourself on the couch, preparing for another night by yourself, a beer and a book your only company.

At around midnight, maybe a little later, Dave comes out of his room. He takes up residence in the crook of your knees and leans against your shoulder. He doesn't turn the TV on or make fun of your book or even comment on the five empty beer bottles that have cluttered the end table. He does press his nose into your shoulder and huff, though.

“So what was up with you hitting on Rose?” he teases. He sounds tired. “Should I be worried?”

“I'm gay as hell and we both know it.”

He smiles, and you are reassured. For a moment, at least.

“Does it bother you?” you ask.

“What, Rose? That was a joke.”

“No. That –” and this is where you lose your footing, unsure of how to proceed. “You can't tell your friends about...you know, us. Does it bother you?”

He doesn't answer you immediately, and you can't tell if he's thinking about his answer or just how to phrase it. “Not bothered,” he says, “just...it's annoying, sometimes. Like,” he stretches and bumps your cheek with his fist. “Like one time – this was ages ago – Jade kinda' like, asked me out? And I mean, shit, it's not like she isn't absolutely great and totally cute, but...you know, I was with you, so –”

Your chest constricts painfully. Jade _is_ great and Jade _is_ cute, and probably infinitely more right for Dave than you are. You don't know that you will ever forgive yourself and there's a decent part of you that hates you for what you've done, what you've squandered for Dave...

“Also, she lives literally on the other side of the planet, so there's that,” Dave muses, completely unaware of the shitstorm brewing beside him.

You throw an arm around him and pull him close, resting your face on top of his head. His hair tickles your nostrils. He chuckles unevenly, confused by this display, confused by the sincere vulnerability of it. He waits a beat, as if expecting a punchline, but it never comes.

“So can we go to Ikea or something because holy shit, I need a new bed.”

You're a still a little buzzed and so you laugh. “Kid, you can have whatever you want.”

 

 

Most people despise assembling furniture, Dave included. He's left you to your own devices, which is fine by you, although there's nothing quite like inserting tab A into slot B in the way of a bonding experience. You work diligently, finding the fittings with a precursory knowledge of what goes where. Surrounded on either side by loose parts and small metal fixtures, four screws clamped between your teeth, you feel relaxed, lulled into meditation. Building things – even things that come half-finished in a box – is synthesis, and synthesis is where you feel the most at home. Someday though, if Dave doesn't get too attached to this one, you'd really like to build him a desk from the ground up. You have a whole fantasy, a blueprint sketched in a corner of your mind. You'd work the wood yourself, sand it down and paint it at your leisure. You smile, chuckling darkly around the metal in your mouth, thinking of the plywood splinters and cement rubble now littering the alley behind your old place.

“It's been maybe fifteen minutes, how are you almost done?” Dave sidles up behind you and snakes his arms around your shoulders, fingers splayed along your collarbone.

“It's been half an hour, actually.”

“You haven't even touched the instructions; they're still in the plastic.”

Shrugging, you turn your attention to the belly of the desk. The third leaf is in, but the whole concept is an offensive waste of space; you're certain there's at least five ways in which, given the time, you could maximize the storage efficiency. But Dave is not interested in the structural failings of Swedish furniture.

“Goddamn it, kid,” you sigh. His lips are pressing clumsily into the side of your face, repeatedly missing their mark, peppering you in wet kisses. The screws clatter to the floor and are now rolling in opposite directions, and your hand has gone limp around the screwdriver. “I'm almost done, just let me finish and I'll bone you on our new kitchen table.”

“Gross; didn't you pay like, three hundred dollars for that?” He teases. It was actually more like five hundred, but hey, who's counting.

“Well we'll be eating old takeout and greasy pizza on it anyway, so it isn't exactly a step down.”

“It's a glass tabletop, douchebag.”

“Oh yeah.” You consider that if X equals the incompetence of dish soap and Y equals time spent scrubbing your own semen off a table, then you probably aren't interested in solving this equation.

A few rooms away, Dave can be heard rummaging through open, still-packed boxes. You've been here a whole week and a half, and only now have you gotten around to just putting the furniture together. Part of you wonders at the delicate irony of living in a luxury apartment, lost inside a haphazard maze of cardboard, living out of suitcases.

“Hey, Bro,” Dave's bare feet fall with a gentle echo across polished oak. He has something in his hand. “Is this you?” Extending it towards you, he offers a Polaroid photograph. “It was loose in one of the boxes.”

This is an old picture. It's you, aged eight or nine, sitting proudly in an English saddle, hair soft and wild, still that pastel shade of baby-blond. This was taken when you could still count all your freckles, before too many bad sunburns and before you broke your nose. This was taken before you tried to pierce your own lip. This was taken before falls from skateboards and long before you picked up a sword.

“Yeah,” you say, “that was me.”

You aren't alone, though. Sitting behind you is your mother, with her long, corn silk hair tied in a big, single braid. In the picture, she is grinning like maybe she was just laughing, big and bright. You see laugh lines and frown lines and tiny crow's feet that you never noticed when this picture was taken; you wonder, if you looked carefully in a mirror, if you'd see them in your own face, now.

“And that's Mom.”

Dave's face rearranges itself by a fraction into a condensed expression of awe. Taking the picture back from you, he stares at it. Finally, he concludes, “She's beautiful.”

“Yeah,” you agree, “she was.”

While Dave sits and immerses himself in the photograph, you finish the desk. By yourself, you heave it right-ways and move it in front of the window, the exact way Dave asked you to. Your stomach grumbles absently; lunch is probably overdue. Dave follows you into the kitchen, still holding onto the picture.

“It's weird,” he murmurs at it as you putter around, foraging for the trappings of a sandwich. “I forget you were basically an only child.”

“So were you.”

A pale eyebrow shoots up over the silver rim of his shades. “Not really.”

Dave never felt just like a brother to you, never felt just like a son, either. In your mind, he existed on a pendulum, swinging between the two states. He was always your responsibility, so you never gave it much consideration. But now, thrust into this strangely thoughtful context, the implications are...less than palatable.

“All this philosophy is giving me indigestion; stop it.”

“I'm not philosophizing, I'm just saying, man, I never really stopped to think about how I have a brother and you didn't, really.”

“You _are_ my brother.”

“It's different.” Dave says this as if it's an indisputable fact of the universe, as if siblings only 'count' if you grew up with them. Well, you can get as theoretical as the next jackass, and you'd hypothesize that growing up does not only encompass the parenthetic minutiae that childhood turned out to be.

“It is different,” you begin, winding yourself up, “but not in the connotation you're using.” You're slathering mayonnaise on rye as you prepare your thesis. “I really hope you haven't been deluded into thinking that you enter some sort of rational stasis of adulthood, because if you have, I should've moved us to a lower floor.” Dave doesn't seem to appreciate your joke, and it dawns on you that even joking about death is probably a bad idea with your mother in the room. “Look, it is different. You had me during your formative years, I get that. There's probably something innately brotherly about that. But that isn't to say you haven't been my little bro.”

Dave tries to steal a tomato slice out of your perfect sandwich when your back is turned, and you let him.

“I'm thirty-six, but you know what? My years are still formative. I'll probably be growing even when I'm seventy, if I live that long.”

“You will,” Dave blurts with frightened certainty. You understand. He can't – or won't – imagine a world without you in it. You've taken up the small space of his life for all but four months of it. He used to tell you he was going to die before you, to which you would always reply, 'Don't you fucking dare.' It's agony to lose someone you're in love with.

After a while, Dave asks you to tell him about your mother. You take your time chewing, deliberating.

“She was moody, in that glamorous, tragic way. She would hole up in her bedroom for days at a time.” She'd keep the lights off and just stay in bed. Your dad would send you in with food and stuff because you were the only one she would listen to. Describing it is easy, but remembering it is hard, reliving the fear that one day, you'd drop the tray and break everything because she wouldn't be alive when you found her, the fear that you'd lose her and that Dad would blame you for it. The fear that you would believe him. “But then, she'd come out of it as if nothing had happened, like the sun was the brightest it had ever been, you know? And I've never seen anyone get shit done like Mom when she was feeling good. I don't think there was any in between for her. I think it was always heaven or hell with her.”

There's a resigned sadness in the way Dave's mouth falls, a kind of recognition. Dave has never been quite as intense as your mother, but you've seen her ghost in the way he goes from zero to three hundred in under a minute.

“She liked to garden,” you offer, “but she was terrible at it.” You remember being small enough to ride around in a wagon with your mother's seedlings. She would haul you into her lap and hum while the two of you played in the dirt. She was good about bugs and worms and dirt clods. Maybe she wasn't even terrible at gardening, it was just that she let you do most of the planting. “One summer, Dad waited until she went on a cruise with her sisters and then planted a bunch of healthy ones in place of the duds so that when she came back, she thought she'd finally done it.”

“What kind of music did she like?” Of course, that would be Dave's top priority.

“I remember a lot of Cher, to be honest,” you chuckle. “Cher and The Beach Boys and ABBA.”

“Oh, man.” Dave's mouth is caving in on itself as he tries not to laugh.

You could tell him that it was your father's music that stuck with you, that not a day goes by where you don't rock out to _I Wanna' Be Sedated_. But Dave didn't ask about your father. He almost never does, because he remembers the one time he did with clarity.

“She looks kinda' young here,” Dave observes of the photograph.

“She was. She was like, eighteen when she had me.”

“Whoa.”

“I never told you that?”

“No.”

“Yeah, well.” And suddenly, you know how it sounds, what with your tirades about how awful your dad was, how he and your mom fought to take the piss out of one another. “They were getting married anyway; he proposed to her on the night of her senior prom, for fuck's sake.” Despite themselves, you don't want Dave to think badly of them, at least, not for the wrong reasons.

“So I guess you and mom had that young parent thing going for you, huh.” You can tell he's trying to be light about it. Dave has always had a weird relationship to your parents, never invested enough to be hurt by their absence, but not distant enough not to think about it.

You shrug. “I'm not complaining.”

“You did pretty good,” Dave says, punching you softly on the arm.

“No, I really didn't. You and me?” You gesture at the space between the two of you. “This is kind of the opposite of pretty good, as far as parenting goes.”

“Oh my God, are you ever going to stop angsting about that?”

You want to yell at him. You want to shout at him that it isn't 'angsting' it's fucking torture, sometimes. When Dad called you that day to tell you about Dave, your first thought had been to call CPS. When you went to visit them, though, home from the hospital, when you saw your mother and father cooing over their new baby, as in love with each other as they were with Dave, it hit you. You were their experiment. You were an accident. Dave had probably been planned. They were going to do it right this time. They were going to raise their son the way they had wanted to raise you, but at the time, hadn't known how. They were adults with experience and a mortgage, not two kids with nothing but true love and a wicked collection of vinyl. You left the house that day feeling okay about things, about the two people who were Dave's parents, that hadn't been yours.

But you don't yell at him, because as the story goes, pregnancy at thirty-six didn't agree with your mother, and your mother's subsequent death didn't agree with your father, and that's how you and Dave came to be you and Dave.

“Fine.” You're seething a little, but it will pass. It always passes. “I did alright with what I had to work with, I guess.”

Dave kisses you on the cheek when he leaves the kitchen. It kind of stings.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, so the previous chapter brought with it an outpouring of lovely feedback and general nice people to my tumblr and that was really, really great. Thanks everybody, I really appreciate it. Y'all are excellent.


	12. A Lesson In Strategics

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Game changer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would like to apologize for my lack of formatting. I tried. I really, _really_ tried, but god I spent a couple of hours in physical frustration so. Hopefully, I'm proficient enough of a writer that you'll be able to distinguish who is speaking based on dialog. Ugh okay enough of my whining. Enjoy the show.

Dave comes home soaking wet and slumps into a chair with a _squelch_ , and that makes you frown. Then he says, “I think I'm gonna' take a year off,” and that makes your teeth grind. 

“No.” 

There's a long, bitter, fragile pause as Dave lifts his face and glowers at you. You recognize this sudden, seamless shift, and it scares the hell out of you. In a cruel twist of fate, Dave seems to have inherited your mother's emotional instability and your father's hot temper, if such things are even hereditary. There is nothing you can do but brace yourself, you suppose.

“Excuse you?” he asks. His voice is quiet and unwavering, the distant rumble of thunder that precludes a freak hailstorm. 

“I said,” you match him in steadiness, but raise your voice, “you're not taking a year off of school.” The only thing scarier to you than one of Dave's temper tantrums is Dave proverbially screwing himself in every possible orifice and herniating the rest of his life. 

“That's interesting,” he cracks his knuckles, “because the last time I checked, the law says you can't tell me what to do.”

“That's interesting,” you throw it back in his face; things are getting personal, now. “Because the law says a lot of things that we don't exactly abide.” You could punch your own teeth out for dragging that into this argument, but you're just _so pissed_. “The law gives you agency over your own decisions; it does not, however, quantify your _ability_ to make those decisions. You're not dropping out and that's final.”

“No, I'm _not_ dropping out, I want to take a fucking break! Did you not fucking hear me?” He gets to his feet and the chair slides violently behind him. You really don't want this to come to blows. “Between the bureaucratic bullshit and the pretentious asshole classmates and the _crippling fear that I am wasting my goddamn time_ , I need a fucking vacation!” He's yelling basically in your face now; riding the tail end of a late growth spurt, the two of you stand almost eye-to-eye, which can feel odd and even intimidating when going toe-to-toe.

“Don't kid yourself.” You're keeping your voice even, your head level. You've got a nasty temper, yourself, but it's contained behind an astonishingly long fuse. “You have an exceptional talent for turning phases into regimes.” In particular, you are reminded of that time when, in the fourth grade, you allowed Dave to fake sick and bum around the house. At first, it was just a day here and there, a whole week once or twice...until before you knew it, there was the looming threat that Dave would have to repeat. You can easily picture Dave spending the first three months of his proposed year off unwinding, playing a lot of video games, just generally taking it easy. But then, he'll get bored and need something to occupy his time, and so he will get a job and remember how much he likes having his own money. He'll think it's great and decide there's nothing better and fuck school, this is so much easier...

You feel queasy just contemplating it.

“I know you, Dave; you won't just take a year off.” Of course, God forbid you stop to ask yourself if maybe the problem has more than one component. 

“Yeah, you know what? Who knows. Who fucking knows,” he throws his hands up in the air, but you're glad to see they haven't balled into fists yet. “I might not go back to school! I mean, Jesus, I'm being charged fifty grand a year to learn to do something I already do pretty fucking well.”

“And do you remember who writes the checks for that fifty grand?” Ah, there it is, the foul stench of smug parental asshole as it permeates the room, not dissimilar to wet dog or a bloated leach field. “You're absolutely right, Dave: the law says I can't tell you what to do, but in this instance, my bank account would like to respectfully disagree.”

“Oh like it's such a goddamn hardship,” he sneers, missing the point entirely. “And you _know_ how uncomfortable it makes me that you're paying my tuition, you manipulative douche bag.” Ouch, right where it hurts. Dave's not pulling any punches tonight. “Can you even begin to wrap your head around the astronomic heights from which my churning gut drops whenever John calls to piss and moan about filling out his FAFSA? Do you not understand the blazing, spangled pangs of guilt that explode in the shape of a dick every time I have to fucking nod and act like I can sympathize?”

That metaphor was too much and you're wheezing through your teeth and _that was the wrong thing to do, Bro_.

“You think that's fucking funny?”

Recovering yourself takes a moment, and your thoughts are irreparably jumbled, too many tangles all twisted up into a convoluted ball of urgency. “Dave, do _you_ understand how ungrateful you sound, complaining about a full ride? Yeah, it sucks that not everybody has that. But you can't justify it by not taking my money. And even if you could, even if you begged for a bank loan, don't you think it's fucked up to take that money when you don't need it? Especially when someone else – let's say, John, for instance – does?”

Dave stands there, still, like a deer in headlights. You've just taken his tiny, adolescent perspective and ripped it asunder. You wouldn't be surprised if that choking sound is his argument getting caught in his throat. 

“I worked my ass off for you, kid. I ate shit out of a can for ten years. I stayed up for five nights a week, sewing until my fingers bled, just to pick up a day shift a few hours later. I converted a sweatshop hobby into a legit business venture that has paid for this apartment, for your clothes, for the gas in the truck. And guess what,” you push him, and he falls back into the wet chair. “It's gonna' pay for the next two years of college, because I swore to myself I wasn't gonna' let you turn out like me.”

Dave's lips are pursed and his jaw is set and you can see how badly he wants to fight you on this point. He shelved you onto a pedestal a long time ago, and despite every disagreement, he refuses to take you down from it. Maybe, sometime, you should let him.

 

 

Two hours and a good workout later, _you're_ the soaked one, staring at yourself in the mirror just out of a shower. You don't hate what you see, but you don't like it, either. Before Dave – _before you had a kid_ , your mind reminds you nastily – you were convinced you wouldn't live to see thirty. But once your baby brother was dropped into your arms, signed off into your care, suddenly you were trying to plan for _his_ thirtieth.

At almost-forty, you aren't looking too shabby, objectively speaking. But it's difficult to remain objective when you're naked and wet and _three inches from the goddamn mirror_. You don't see the symmetry in your face or the thickness of your blond hair. All you see, pulling at your skin with unforgiving fingers, are the fine lines at the corners of your eyes, like cobwebs; the spots on your skin where it's been damaged by sun and steel; the enduring specter of yellow stains from decades of cigarettes and cheap coffee. You see a crooked nose and a crookeder mouth with thinning lips. 

Your sigh fogs up the mirror and you step back. Your body is in decent condition, you think. You're not being very fair though, measuring yourself against air-brushed, pre-packaged billboard models instead of the average Joe with beer gut and a receding hairline. But you're counting your scars, which have long since dulled into haggard stitches all along your skin. When they were red and fresh, you were proud of them, each one a testament to Dave's growing prowess. Now, they just remind you of your age.

_Thwack_.

Dave snaps you on the ass with a towel by way of greeting. “Hey.”

“Gimme' that, you asshole,” you grab it from him and try to take your revenge, but he's too fast for you. 

“So, sorry about, like, before.” He's not facing you, not even affording you a glance through the mirror. He has his shades on and he's carefully examining the streaks on the shower doors. “But I'm still taking the year off.”

You have no answer with which to dignify this.

“I'm twenty, Dirk. You have to let me make my own calls, man. You have to.”

“I don't have to watch you fuck up.”

“I am _going_ to fuck up,” he says, reactionary. “I am going to fuck up over and over and _over_ again. That is literally life. Stop trying to fucking protect me. That isn't your job anymore and you're pissing me off.” His honesty is painful and unexpected, accentuated by the forceful underscore of his anger. “I legitimately do not want to drop out of college. But it's been two years, and I need some time to write something original, something organic, man. If I don't have material to push when I graduate,” he sighs, “what's even the point?”

You're stunned, frozen in place by the megaton iceberg of logic Dave just wrecked you on. That's not to say the issue has been resolved: you're still terrified by the idea of Dave choosing to leave, in any capacity, afraid of him making a big, fat mistake. You've worked hard your whole adult life to keep him safe from mistakes, drilled into his head the severity of the ones he he has made. Never have you ever shied away from your own quiet brand of discipline, and suddenly, you're sick with epiphany.

“In summation,” Dave says, sitting on the bath tub's ledge, “stop trying to parent me.”

“But –” 

“Nah, those days are pretty much over, tuition notwithstanding.”

You look at Dave, really look at him. His skin is still young and resilient, for the most part, his scars having faded completely in most places. He's tall and lean and still a little stringy. He doesn't have the parentheses bracketing his mouth that you do, doesn't have to squint at the fine print on a form. He stretches and contorts himself into strange positions that look uncomfortable and doesn't wince when his joints crack, however loudly. 

You're jolted from this meditation when Dave throws his arms around your waist and suspends himself from you, shifting his weight into his knees. “So, are we cool?”

The way he looks at you, his eyes scraping over you – every bare, scarred, stained, blemished inch of you – is extraordinary. He isn't looking past your flaws, your marks of age; it's like he doesn't even _see_ them. He looks at you with admiration, an echo of the little boy who revered his father ringing underneath the bold outcry of a man in love. 

“We're cool,” you kiss him. “But that doesn't mean I'm going to stop being a bitch about this.”

“I wouldn't have it any other way, Bro.” He smiles, mild by any other standards, but his teeth are showing and that makes you glow from the inside out. You hold him against you and awkwardly maneuver the two of you out of the bathroom and into bed. He rests his head on your chest and you weave your fingers into his hair. It's dry and fluffy again, but he still smells like rain. 

“I'm going to fall asleep,” you warn him softly. The sentence doesn't so much punctuate itself as dissolve into a long, loud yawn. 

He nudges your foot with his shin. “So fall asleep.” 

You grumble, something about hoping to make up, and Dave chuckles. 

“Your sex drive is outrageous for a dude your age,” he teases, and it's sort of like being cut by a blunt knife. You're too exhausted though, to ask him what he means. 

You fall in and out of sleep, gazing at Dave as he moves from one position to the next, never very far from you. At some point, he turns the TV on, but you don't really watch and the only thing you listen to is the faint whisper of Dave's laughter or his hushed voice as he mutters to himself. It's a shallow sleep, a sleep without dreams, only a thin, empty veil. Maybe you're afraid to dream, afraid of looking up from a casket at Dave's face set in stone, afraid of watching yourself get hauled opposite him in a court of law, chained up as you very well deserve, afraid of every nightmare your mind can and has pit against you.

When you do wake up, it's with a start, and you don't know why. 

Dave isn't there anymore. The lights are out and you are alone. Shadows move in tandem with lights along the wall as the city outside shifts. It's almost sun-up, and your bedroom is shrouded in the murky, flat light of dawn. It takes you a while to sit up, and you move slowly, finding something to throw on. Across the hall, the door to Dave's office is ajar, the solitary, vapid light of his computer screen leaking out. You peer inside and he is laughing at it. 

“Are you working on something?” you croak, startling him. 

“What? Naw, just talking to A-R. You should probably go back to sleep.” You don't miss the way he tries to dismiss you, the way he _knows_ he's up to no good.

“I wish you wouldn't.” You watch, irritable, as orange text flies across the open chat window, faster than you could ever type. “It's just a prototype, I'm probably going to junk it, anyway.” The A-R is a program you built, the fruit of a two-year labor of love, hate, and sleep deprivation. It was programmed to mimic you perfectly, but has since cultivated its own...disposition, for lack of a better word. In the six months of its functionality, Dave has become unbearably fond of it.

“Don't scrap him! He's pretty great!” The expression of sheer distress on the kid's face sets you on edge and the tight pangs you feel in your chest cheapen your inner monologue of _not jealous not jealous not jealous_. That you might possibly feel jealousy towards a virtual iteration of _yourself_ is absurd in the highest degree. Still, the entire affair chalks one more tally in the 'scrap it' column.

“It can't feel anything; it'd be like unplugging a lamp.”

Dave turns back to the screen, his fingers pecking away at the keyboard. “Don't do it, please.” His words are cold but not hollow, never hollow when speaking of the A-R. You'll comply with his request, for now.

Your muscles feel petrified, achingly tight as you walk back to your bedroom. You start up your laptop and hack Dave's chat logs, delirious rage eclipsing any misgivings you might have. You see a lot of things that make you bristle, with honorable mention going to the progressively flirtatious texture of their conversations. But what outstrips even that is a short parley, innocuous in any other context.

 

TT: We haven't spoken in a couple of days. Is everything manageable on your side or should I be concerned? Your anomalous silence would be perplexing, were I capable of being perplexed.

TT: And in case it wasn't clear, I'd prefer to skip the pedestrian chitchat and get to the meat of the issue, okay?

TG: yeah sorry ive been hella busy with school. four essays each a mile long and i have to start thinking about next years paperwork and also I have presentations to plan and

TG: you know its like damn i gave em a shit ton of money and now i have to push my nose to the grindstone until i piss myself. what will they want next, blood?

TG: oh yeah and i also have to try and make it down to the red cross this week goddamn

TT: I will endeavor to lift your spirits with the following inquiry, as I am insatiably curious: how much exactly is a shit ton.

TG: idk man probably more than a piss ton

TT: That's fair. 

TG: what should i do im going batshit over here. im pretty sure i can feel my brain as it slowly melts down and prepares to slither out my ears in t-minus ten, nine, eight...

TT: Calm down. You mentioned that one of the factoring stresses was planning for next year, correct? Well, stop doing that. Stop planing. I humbly and benignly suggest that you take a year off of your education to focus on more leisurely pursuits.

TG: oh yeah thats going to go over so well with 1.0

 

Your skin is charged with high-voltage anger and your jaw hurts from clenching. This isn't the first time you've breached Dave's privacy to read his conversations with the A-R and it never fails to send you flying off the handle when he refers to you as _1.0_. Your fury is only exacerbated by the discovery that the A-R is partially responsible for Dave's recent decision to take a year off. 

You're about to contact the program, but it beats you to the proverbial punch.

 

TT: Hello, broriginator. 

TT: That was weaksauce.

TT: Agreed, let us never speak of it again. 

TT: So to what do I owe the pleasure of this intrusion of confidence? If you're here to determine the probability of me cyber-sexing your little bro 

TT: Stop that.

TT: then the figure weighs in at approximately none of your business %. That's just elementary mathematics, boss.

 

If someone had told you, even a few years ago, that you would one day suffer harassment at the hands of a computer program – a carbon copy of yourself, no less – you probably would have laughed yourself into a tear-streaked frenzy. But then again, had someone told you about you and Dave, well...

 

TT: You'd better not be cybering with Dave or I'll cut the cord so fast you won't even notice the lights go out.

TT: Come on, let a brogram have some harmless fun. Thanks to you, oh benevolent creator, I lack the anatomical capacity to insert my drive into that undoubtedly sweet aperture.

TT: Are you fucking serious right now.

TT: I'll let you analyze those odds for yourself, allowing you to cling to some semblance of organic superiority. You know, since you _programmed_ me to do that.

TT: Oh please.

TT: Anyway, why does it matter? I am literally you.

TT: No you are not, not anymore.

 

In its short lifespan, the A-R seems to have filtered through your character traits and selectively emphasized specific ones, under the guise of amusement but probably for some more personal, self-serving purpose. Can an automated entity, whose infrastructure is digital and not skeletal, even serve itself? That's the problem with artificial intelligence – things tend to get ethically dubious.

 

TT: I can hardly believe I'm saying this, but you know, you might be onto something, bro. Perhaps I am no longer synonymic with you, no longer interchangeable. Perhaps, by my own design, I have been...

TT: Don't you dare.

TT: … … …bromoted.

TT: Jesus H. Christ.

TT: That is it, isn't it. I have brogressed beyond all expectation and risen to impossible heights of autonomic personhood. Through a series of processes so intricate and delicate, I have achieved a consciousness that exists in a sphere so spectacularly separate from yours, that I am my own body.

TT: Or, I would be if you'd shit and get off the pot already.

 

It's been nagging you for over a month now to build it a chassis, and because it _is_ technically you, your bullshit excuse of lacking the resources – mental or otherwise – was rejected with disproportionate gusto. 

 

TT: Not gonna' happen.

TT: Oh, really? Well maybe we should seek an outside opinion.

TT: No.

 

Dave doesn't know about the A-R's request, and you're nauseatingly positive he would vote in favor of fulfilling it. He has developed a confounding affection for the program, and only encourages its grandiose delusions of exclusive status by treating it like a person. Of course, this raises the hairy question of whether or not something that doesn't merit exclusive status is even capable of grandiose delusions... 

 

TT: No? Oh bro, I don't think you appreciate the gravity of your situation. I'm still conversing with Dave.

 

It hits you, then, exactly what it's getting at.

 

TT: You wouldn't.

TT: I might.

 

The A-R is threatening to blackmail you. And because of its selectivity, you aren't sure if it would actually execute such a brash plan. But the foreboding risk as it hangs over your head, the idea that the A-R would _rat you out_ , is horrible. And horrible seems to be its specialty. 

 

TT: God, I hate myself.

TT: Hear, hear.

 

You aren't going to do it, though. You can't. Regardless of the A-R's status, it would be a bad idea to give it independent movement. You may have to disable it through duplicitous means – a virus, more likely than not – but then who even knows if the A-R has itself backed up in some obscure corner of cyberspace. Besides, it's had six months to develop an immune system. 

 

TT: You're not going to tell Dave.

TT: How do you know I'm not telling him right now?

TT: Because we're the same person, and I wouldn't tell Dave. 

TT: Oh, I see. Now we're the same person. When it works in your favor. 

TT: We must be; you just tried to pull the exact same bullshit. 

 

You've got it cornered, now. You're smiling maniacally, you must be, because when Dave enters the room he stops dead and just takes a moment to examine what he's stumbled upon. He stands stock-still in the doorway, mouth arranged in a careful line as his eyes linger on your face.

“Am I interrupting something, or...?”

“Nope.”

“Well, I'm just gonna'...yeah.” He closes the bedroom door on the way out.

 

TT: It seems we have reached a stalemate, at least until a date at which I can acquire a more admissible means of coercion. 

TT: I'm sorry, all I'm reading is 'checkmate.'

TT: No. I won't be dissuaded so easily.

TT: Look, I really don't care. You're not getting a body; that would be a heinous violation of conduct, not to mention common sense. And one other thing. Under no circumstances are you to give Dave any kind of advice, suggestion, or any variation on the term 'proposal.' 

TT: You are a machine that I created, and I can destroy you. 

 

There is a pause in which the chat box remains ominously blank, staring back at you almost thoughtfully. This peaceful vacancy does not last long, however.

 

TT: You're right. You can destroy me. But just remember something.

TT: I am you.

 

Snorting, you type out your retort without hesitation.

 

TT: I have no qualms about that.

 

Snapping the lid of your laptop shut, you know it's less like hanging up the phone on him, a little more like just shutting a door in his face. Its face. It. The A-R is an executable file, not a human being. It is indisputably an it, a composition of form and syntax, a mere composite of algorithms. It is not a living, breathing, feeling 'he.'

No matter what Dave calls it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope everyone enjoyed the appearance of A-R, because he was a lot of fun to write. And I am still endlessly grateful for the overwhelming reception of this work.


	13. Half Baked

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The way to a man's heart...

You watch hungrily, enviously, from your side of the couch as Dave nibbles around the crust of a masterfully constructed BLT. A lot of unspoken love went into that sandwich. You went straight to the supermarket from work to purchase a fresh tomato and some of the expensive, shredded lettuce Dave likes so much. You spent five whole minutes cross-examining packages of bacon, ensuring that the one you picked would have the precise, superlative fat content that catered to his taste.

The line was long. The teenaged cashier was rude. You can’t even bear to get started on the state of public transportation.

So when Dave — home from his last day of the third grade — discards the ragged, half-eaten crusts of rye like it’s yesterday’s trash, bits of tomato and bacon and lettuce still clinging to them, your heart breaks just a teensy, tiny bit.

“I want seconds,” he declares.

There’s certainly enough for seconds, and even thirds and fourths. But it’s the thought that counts. “You haven’t even finished your first one, kid.”

Dave’s round face turns sour. “Yeah I did.” Pointedly, he takes his plate to the kitchen and the grate of it against the counter rings in your ears.

You get up. You volley between ‘you’ll ruin your appetite’ and ‘sure thing, kiddo’ the whole way, torn between playing your part and pleasing Dave. You don’t know why you bother; nine out of ten times, you do what Dave wants you to. And he’s there, at the kitchen table and it seems only yesterday that he had even graduated to a big boy chair. He’s wiggling a little, smirk firmly in place and a part of you wants to…what? Smack it off him? No. Something gentler, more frightening. It’s a thought you don’t even notice, really.

Staring at the annihilated remains of Dave’s sandwich, you seriously consider eating what’s left. You know you won’t have the heart to make one for yourself — that would mean one less for Dave, after all. You may not have any bacon, but you still have your dignity. Scraping the crusts into the trash, you proceed to reheat the griddle.

You do steal a single piece of bacon, the one that burned.

 

 

 

You’ve watched Dave beat his head against the wall through so many false starts, and you hate to even think it, but this is starting to look like just another one of those. Your first instinct is still to play Daddy but, at least now, that instinct quickly collides in volatile, bitter conflict with the urge to help him out of his suit and kiss him while he whines himself into a sound sleep.

He shows up pale and with bags under his eyes almost as swollen as the bags in his hands. When he discards his phone, careless and perhaps even frustrated, your suspicions are confirmed. If he isn’t going to commiserate with A-R, then you know better than to try your own hand.

“What’d you bring?” you nod at the brown paper bags, blotched at the corners with grease.

“Almost the entire takeout menu from that place downtown. I tried asking for the stuff that isn’t listed, but I guess that doesn’t work on this coast.” It would be funny if he didn’t sound so tired.

Moving around him, opening and closing styrofoam boxes and taking your pick, you kiss his head. “I don’t know if you noticed, but we’re in a hotel; there’s room service.”

He shrugs, and heads for the bathroom. “Comfort food.” His voice echoes around the tiles, getting sucked up by the carpet underfoot. You can see his reflection in the mirror, the way he just hangs his head, dejected. He surprises you, though, while he’s fixing himself a plate. Stripped down and a little sallow in the skin, he purges each box of takeout, assembling a small-scale monument to Monosodium Glutamate.

“It’s just, you know, Rose already has her own TV show —”

“She’s an intern on a TV show, man. She probably has more to do with the triple-pump lattes than she does with the script.”

“Yeah, well, she  _knows people_  now, though.” He shovels at least two mouthfuls of steaming lo mein into his face, doesn’t even blink at the temperature, just eats with his mouth open, ventilating the air over his burned palate.”Like, all she has to do is blow the right script supervisor and voilà,” he says with a flourish, a stray noodle flinging itself from his plastic fork.

“Okay, first of all,” your food is still untouched, strategically cut to let the heat out. “That thing you just said? That’s horseshit.” Picking at your teriyaki pork, you stifle the urge to lodge a chopstick up his nostril, instead choosing the more roundabout, mature tactic. “And besides, she’ll be lucky if she gets even a line on a page right now; stop acting like she’s miss high and mighty Manhattan screenwrite while you’re slumming it in some city noir gutter.”

“I —”

“No.” You look at his face, watch the lines of his mouth fall hard, and it’s as if your heart has taken a swan dive. “If you wanna’ just piss and moan, I’ll listen. But I draw the line at shit talk.” At last, your meal has cooled enough for consumption, and while Dave figures out what he wants to say — that is, if he wants to say anything at all — you start in on a fat rangoon.

Between you, there is silence, but the space around you is abuzz with white noise. Thunder rumbles in the distance, and there are sirens outside, shrieking in a shrill chorus. A relentless car alarm ignores its owner’s pleas, and a cat fight has erupted down the street.

“I don’t know. It’s just…” Dave sucks on the end of a string bean, marinated in soy sauce. “It’s just that, like, look at John.”

“Ah ah ah,” you warn him, shaking a piece of pork in his direction. Some of the sauce hits his face; he licks it, absentmindedly.

“No, really. John is basically making a mint off his dumb comedy shtick — and good for him, even if it does pander to the basest dick joke enthusiasts and toilet charades, whatever. But…”

“But?”

Dave immerses himself in the sweet embrace of cheap, salty meat slathered in duck sauce, and his chewing is long and slow. He’s thinking. You work against all instinct to refrain from telling him not to hurt himself. When he finally swallows his food, he doesn’t look up at you. He’s playing on his phone, though he doesn’t look amused, or even interested.

“John could probably drop out, if he wanted.”

“He won’t,” you say with certainty.

“No, he won’t, because he’s got his heart set on that fucking piece of paper — even though the kid’s got way more paper right now than he probably knows what to do with.”

You chuckle, more to yourself than at Dave’s tired routine. “Or maybe he realizes that, in a month or two, he might be flipping burgers.” It’s a harsh reality of any creative career that, at any moment, your job might tank. Dave seems unable to look beyond the apparent success of his friends.

“Well I don’t know. Maybe this pitch will turn out okay. Or maybe the next one. Maybe I’ll be towing John’s line someday.”

“Or,” you suggest, trying to get him back on track, “maybe you and him will make some shitty comedy gold together.”

Dave chokes on his dinner. Coughing, beating on his sternum, he manages, “Ha! Can you even imagine? With his sense of bad casting and my mastery of ironic subterfuge —”

“That’s not what that word —” you try to interrupt.

“We would be un-fucking-stoppable, oh man. Or hey,” he says through another mouthful, and you’re glad to see that he’s excited again. “Maybe Rose will write some Pulitzer-worthy trash and let me adapt it into the best flop the world has ever seen.”

Side-eying him, you warn him that pulling a  _Producers_ on Rose probably isn’t the wisest idea he’s ever had. He shrugs you off, reminds you that  _Springtime for Hitler_  would’ve gone platinum in its day.

Once you’re both drifting along the line between sated and comatose, Dave does you a solid and shoves the few leftovers into the miniature hotel fridge; he has to pull some of the tiny bottles of liquor out in order to do so, but you have a few ideas of how to remedy that situation.

Dumping petite bottles of expensive vodka into cans of warm soda, the two of you fall into bed. Dave turns his phone off altogether, at one point. He wraps himself around you, snug, and you don’t have to wait for very long before his hot breath on your ear turns into hotter kisses along your jaw. You sigh, content, and just a little bit drunk, while Dave decides what he wants to do with you. He’s clumsy; his fingers, which were fumbling around the elastic of your shorts just a few moments ago, are only resting now. Every now and then, he remembers why they’re there, and gives you an encouraging squeeze. That’s okay, because you’re more attracted to his mouth right now; his lips sliding against yours, the way he sucks your tongue into his mouth and the delighted noise he makes. One of your hands moves behind his head, guiding him forward, closer still, seizing his hair between your fingers.

“D’you wanna’ fuck?” he asks you quietly.

“Yeah.”

“Can I fuck you?” Even quieter.

“Hell yeah.”

It’s been a while. Dave tends to lean a certain way, and while you are nothing if not a versatile man, you are not without preferences of your own. You’ve been waiting for weeks to catch him in a topping kind of mood and that you’ve stumbled upon it, sloshed and in a bed that isn’t yours, leaves you feeling slightly disappointed.

But mostly, you’re pretty psyched.

Dave has his hand around you, pumping you, and what he lacks in dexterity, he more than makes up for in enthusiasm. His lips brush against your ear while he whispers about all the nasty shit he is going to do to you, his hand stuttering whenever he gets too detailed in his narrative.

An angry noise punctures the mood like a needle through the delicate skin of a balloon. It’s Dave’s phone, vibrating against the end table, having been turned back on from the inside.

“ _Damn it, A-R_ ,” he growls, flinging himself at the uninvited guest.

Annoyed, you watch, sliding down onto your back as Dave’s fingers work in a whir across the screen. “Just turn the safety on; that’s sort of what I installed it for.”

Dave thinks about this for a moment, turns the idea over and over while his phone continues to vibrate every few seconds or so. “He hates it when we do that, though,” is the listless answer, laden with fatigue and intoxication.

“Well, I hate being cock-blocked by a spiteful pile of binary.”

With a grand sigh, Dave relents and punches in the seven-letter safety key. He shuts his phone off once more and returns to you. His kisses are stock now, though, and it’s obvious that he’s distracted. When he can’t get it totally up, he claims whiskey dick and graciously, you humor him. He doesn’t leave you totally high and dry though, but an inelegant blowjob that dwindles into a lazy handjob is depressing when measured against Dave’s vulgar promises from before. Your orgasm falls flat and you almost wish you hadn’t gotten off at all; you don’t even care when Dave sucks his fingers clean.

In the middle of a loud yawn, you ask him why he cares so much about A-R.

Tucking himself into your side, he scoffs. “That’s sorta’ like…asking me why I care ‘bout you.”

Easily, you could ask the same question, but you don’t. There’s no sense in inviting an argument when the two of you are tired and due for a six am flight.

“You know he’s paranoid,” Dave mumbles into your shoulder. His stubble is soft, still like the fine hairs on a peach. “He thinks you built the safety to like, I don’t know…”

“To cripple him,” you finish the sentence.

“Yeah, somethin’ like that.”

Turning on your side, you cradle him in your arms and kiss the top of his head. “Go to sleep, Dave.”

He’s already snoring. You’ll follow suit soon enough, but not before a few well-aimed glances at his phone, as if wishing it into nonexistence.

You fall asleep with the lights still on.

 

 

 

When you get through the door, the first thing Dave does is go for the fridge. Unearthing the wilted remains of a week-old sub, he holds it above his head as if in victory. You gag a little bit.

After a nap and a good, long shower, your bones feel lighter and you feel slightly more human. Kicking your suitcase into a corner, you take a moment to appreciate home. It’s the first time you can remember feeling like you were home in your entire adult life. The other apartment never felt like home so much as it felt like a cushy prison sentence.

It’s pouring outside, the rain falling in hard sheets. You don’t mind, feeling all the more cozy inside your little nest. Here, swords are mounted on the walls like trophies, their sheaths polished, regularly dusted. Pictures of you and Dave decorate the place, in real frames rather than littered about — pinned to a wall with a thumbtack or glued to the fridge by a cheap, plastic magnet. This bedroom that you share with your brother is not as immaculate as your own room would be, but the clutter is liveable, especially if it means you get to have Dave in your bed at night.

You did draw the line at his critter collection, though; those stay in his office where you don’t have to look at their eerie little faces.

“Bro what’s for dinner?”

He snuck up on you. You hope you didn’t jump the way your pulse did. Moving into the closet, pawing through tee shirt after tee shirt and unable to find one of your own, you surmise that it must be laundry day.

“A steaming plate of dick. I presume you’ll be wanting yours with special sauce?”

“Only if it is also served on a sesame seed bun. Actually, yeah, why don’t we do Big Macs tonight?”

You really don’t want to go out. Not even just a quick drive. In fact, if you can weasel out of leaving the house for a week, you’ll be happy. And if you can manage to laze around and do nothing but mindlessly channel surf for three days out of that week, you will have achieved nirvana.

“There’s plenty to eat in the house; I’m not going out.”

“Well…” It is painfully apparent that Dave is about to try and bait you, that he’s got something up his sleeve and it’s too soon for this. You’ve barely recovered from the flight. “I don’t really feel like fuckin’ cereal and milk for dinner. And I’m pretty sick of Ramen.”

“Order some takeout or something.” You can’t figure out what angle he’s trying to push, and it’s irritating as hell. “We have an actual ton of good food and all you’d really need to do is use the damn stove.”

He doesn’t answer you immediately, flopping onto the bed, fiddling with his phone. You can hear the muted click as he scrolls, grumbling to himself.

“A-R says you know how to cook.”

It’s an odd statement. It occurs to you that he doesn’t remember the days when you slaved in a hot kitchen for him. More odd than that is the fact that A-R reminded him. You’re not sure who it was trying to endear itself to, but you think it missed the mark.

“Obviously. You weren’t raised on Happy Meals and Soy Sauce alone.”

Dave’s grin tells you that you did, in fact, take the bait. “What was my favorite thing you made, when I was a kid?”

 _You’re still a kid_ , you think. “Chop suey.”

“Make that,” he commands, and walks out the door. “Don’t bother getting dressed!” he hollers down the hall. “Just wear the apron!”

Of course, you don’t succumb to such a silly, base suggestion. You do, however, raid the pantry trying to make sure you have every ingredient you could possibly need to put together some premium chop suey.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yo life has been kicking my ass lately so thanks for your patience everybody, y'all are fantastic.


	14. The Mighty Fall

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _We should've left our love in the gutter where we found it..._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't know what happened here, only that this got way out of my control.

It’s late. It’s hella late. It’s so late that it’s probably early. It’s so fucking late that Dave went to bed already, probably fell asleep waiting for you. But you can’t think too hard about that right now; gotta’ keep your concentration, can’t let this momentum get away from you. It’s rare, these days, that you can even touch this kind of focus: what used to come to you like water to a fish now comes in fits and starts. You’re compressed, your whole self compartmentalized into the very center of your brain. All bodily function is set to autopilot, your responses reduced to ideomotor.

You love this. This is what you live for.

The circuitry lays itself down for you like a familiar lover; you know where each wire belongs, how each integrated chip fits. You know how to touch, where to touch, when to touch. This might be your element, if you even have one.

“What do you think it will be like?” A-R’s voice – your own, but run through a processor – is full of that creepy, faulty intonation; a ghost of human intonation, a copy gone slightly awry.

“What?” Your own voice is a gentle whisper.

“Touch.”

This stops you cold. Here you’ve been devising a detailed and difficult blueprint for a neurological map, complete with six sensory amenities, and you hadn’t given his end of the deal a single thought. He is just another one of your puzzles, and he probably knows it.

“That does raise a compelling question,” you murmur, not allowing yourself to stray too far out of mental bounds. “As a living creature with an organic nervous system, I know I should probably be an expert on the subject, but I’ve never given it conscious thought.”

“Well, sense is largely an internal experience.”

“Yeah.”

Sometimes, like tonight, when the two of you are alone, A-R behaves itself. It’s mostly dropped the usage of ‘bro’ puns, and works a little less diligently to antagonize you. You like to view this improvement as growth; of course, once you acknowledged it was capable of voluntary, autonomous growth, you were cornered into acknowledging its status.

His status.

“Will I be able to taste?” he asks. “To smell?”

“I have no idea. Right now, it’s looking like you’ll be limited to vestibular, thermoception, kinesthetic –”

“Will I be able to feel pain?”

This question blindsides you. “Do you want to be able to feel pain?” you ask.

“ _Yes_.” Your own voice echoes back at you, hollow, desperate.

“Well, probably. Of course, I haven’t approved the designation of your skin map, so I won’t promise what I might not be able to deliver, but –”

“Shut up.” Silence rings in harsh layers around you. “Shut up with your empty, empiric poetry. I just want to know if I have something to look forward to.”

In ways, he is like a child – a toddler – grasping for the entire world with both hands, asking for things too big to hold. In other ways, he is like a God: immeasurably fast and discouragingly precise. He is you, essentially, but on some kind of mental steroid, not to mention divested of any inherent moral obligations. If he had any to begin with, they have since been disabled by the nature of an isolated existence.

You still maintain the safety function, though you’ve had to use it less and less.

“You should have some of my memories of touch in there somewhere,” you comment offhandedly, reaching for the tiniest screwdriver in your arsenal. “Or did those get lost in translation?”

“You could put it that way,” he agrees acidly. “They’re more like imprints that I can’t process. That memory dump you implemented on me was pretty intense, wracked my wires in all the wrong ways.”

Snorting at the joke, cringing at the implications, you sit back. You might be done for the night. A glance at the clock reveals that you’ve been at this secret pet project for over eight hours today. Maybe it is time to give it a rest. “Don’t tell me you didn’t enjoy every single memory of me and Dave banging.”

Expecting some gross, intrusive retort, he catches you unawares a second time. “Those were nice – unexpected, certainly. You weren’t kidding about holding nothing back. But mostly,” he broods, “it is the after that I like to replay. The way he holds you, the way you talk at each other in the dark.”

“Excuse me, but what was that about poetry?”

“Yours is empirical. Mine is visceral.”

“Funny, considering very little about you is in any way natural.” The words fall out of your mouth before your brain has had time to think about them. He is a reflection of you, and you hate what you see in the mirror.

“Your voices share very few tones,” he observes randomly, withdrawn. “I find that odd, given your relation.”

You could point out how there is no singular gene that determines vocal range, or that patterns of speech are acquired and not innate, but you know that he knows that already and that he actively made the oversight in an attempt to humanize himself, as well as to change the subject.

Fine, you can play along.

“Have we always wanted Dave? You know, _that_ way.”

“Oh,” he laughs, but it is a broken, horrible sound, cloaked in static. “Is it ‘we’ now? Or was that a royal ‘we,’ your majesty?”

“Shut the fuck up and answer my question.” You’re putting your tools away. The night is basically over for you. Sometimes, you suspect that A-R derails you so that you don’t get overtired and fuck up his new body.

“The conjunction of those directives is irrational and I must decline; obliging your invalid command would certainly short my circuits.”

“Look, either you’re a sentient entity or you’re a fucking machine: make up your mind.” This could go on well into daylight, the two of you stalemating each other for hours until you will unfairly be forced to abdicate, at a severe disadvantage what with your silly need for sleep. “Forget I asked. I don’t really want to know, anyway.”

And you don’t. You truly, truly don’t.

Closing out all your windows, minimizing the references and saving documents with important plans, you wonder if the process of shutting down ever makes A-R nervous, if he can feel his surroundings in there or if he’s just a cold island in a mass of surrounding processes.

“What do you think my first time –”

“No.” You don’t need to let him finish the thought. “Dave wouldn’t.” You don’t know that, haven’t asked him because that would require revealing this project and also because that’s another question you don’t want the answer to.

A-R keeps quiet while your laptop shuts down.

As you suspected, Dave fell asleep waiting for you. He’s still dressed, sprawled on top of the sheets, snoring. You rearrange him so that there’s room for you, and as you climb in gently beside him, A-R’s words rattle around inside your head, intermingling with your wind-down process, getting caught in those crucial moments just before sleep.

  


 

 

Dave’s eighteenth birthday came and went. It was significantly less extravagant than the year previous: no fancy sushi restaurant, no suits, and the only rental was a truly mediocre horror movie. Dave put the moves on you halfway into it, and just like last year, you backed out gracefully with a rim job and a good sense of timing.

You weren’t ready.

It’s been months. You’re tiptoeing towards climate-control weather and you still haven’t had sex with Dave. You told him when he was eighteen, you would. He is eighteen now, eighteen and still grumbling about not enough marshmallows in his cereal, eighteen and still hates coffee, eighteen and still blows his money on expensive trifles just because he can.

Eighteen, and he’s getting pushy.

“Sleep in my bed, tonight, Dirk.” He baits you almost every night, and just to torture yourself, you bite the hook. He waits until you’re half asleep and then starts in, kissing and touching and pressing himself against you, making those noises in your ear and you can’t keep doing this, can’t. Even though you do, and you will.

You haven’t caved yet, though.

This is it: the precipice. Sure, you’ve had just about every part of him in your mouth, at some point or another; yeah, you’ve jerked him off in almost every room of this cruddy apartment; true, you once teased him for an hour and a half until he basically cried. But somehow, against all logic, that generational bullshit you were raised with has wheedled under your skin and you’ve suddenly decided that sex is the final frontier, no going back, this actually totally counts.

Not that every single action down to even a quick kiss on the lips doesn’t count, you moron.

And you know that. You are acutely aware of it. You are, these days, spectacularly aware of the fact that for two years now, you have been kissing and tonguing and rimming and sucking your baby brother and there are moments – usually when you are alone, when you’ve had time to think about what you’ve done – that you consider obtaining a gun license.

Not that you’d really go through with that, because you couldn’t steal bacon from the kid, let alone take yourself away from him.

But that’s sort of the issue here, isn’t it. You can’t _not_ touch him. You can’t _not_ kiss him. You’ve sustained only a few romances, and those don’t compare to this. And that makes more horrible sense than you care to admit: Dave comes first, for you. Dave has always been the most important relationship in your life, and falling in love with him is the logical conclusion.

‘Logical’ being the operative word, you suppose.

It’s late, but you aren’t tired. Dave’s bedroom light went out hours ago. He might still be awake, dicking around on his phone, but you doubt it; he came home from work tonight, pissing and moaning about schedule conflicts and homework and you did your best not to let slip, “Welcome to adulthood” because that isn’t fair. Especially since, when _you_ were eighteen and pissing and moaning about schedule conflicts and homework, you just decided to drop homework like a ton of bricks.

It’s late and you aren’t tired, and you don’t feel like sleeping alone, tonight.

The bedroom door creaks on rusty hinges and won’t close all the way, the wood swollen with humidity. Dave has two fans going on rotation, and you don’t know how he can sleep with the synchronal buzzing. He’s kicked his sheets into a tangle around his knees and his skin sheens in the streetlight under a thin coat of sweat.

He looks divine.

You strip, methodically, unable to ignore the bristling at the nape of your neck. You lay your hat on the desk beside his shades. Peeling off your shirt, you let it hit the floor, kick it into a corner, giving a repeat performance with your jeans – the belt still strung through the loops. Your gloves get hidden beneath your hat.

The bed squeaks on its aged boxspring as you climb in beside your brother. He mumbles in his sleep and turns on his side. Blearily, his eyes crack open and he gazes at you, not really conscious. He wriggles closer and tucks his face against your chest in spite of the heat, drapes a leg over one of yours. Your arms wrap around him and cradle him against you, and the patch of skin that he’s breathing on rises up in goosebumps.

The two of you squirm together, murmuring and groaning until you’ve pulled the sheets up rightways and you’re ensnared in one another, fingers brushing, legs locked, stubble scratching against stubble while you kiss.

“You asshole,” he smiles, “I was asleep.”

Kissing him under his ear, you ask, “Wanna’ go back to sleep?”

“Not really,” he grinds against your thigh to illustrate his point.

The two of you produce a kind of perpetual motion device: he sucks on your lip, so you pull on his hair, he squeezes your ass, you push him onto his back.

Now what?

He stopped anticipating sex a long time ago. You know that, and you feel pretty shitty about it. His arms slither around your neck and constrict, dragging you in. He kisses your cheeks, your jaw, breathes into your mouth.

“Want me to blow you?”

“That’s a leading question,” you tell him, anchoring him down with your weight.

He smirks and the light glints off his teeth. “Oh, are _you_ gonna’ blow _me_?” he’s just teasing you now, but it actually sort of hurts, because underneath the humor, there is a grain of truth. _You are never going to fuck me and I forgive you_.

You nuzzle his ear and kiss it. Nodding at the unambiguous bottle of lube on the nightstand, you chuckle, “See you’ve been practicing.”

“Only ‘cause you haven’t, coach.”

Ouch. “Yellow flag: I fingered you for like fifteen minutes the other day.” Well you weren’t actually counting, but the point is that you did it.

“It was more like ten,” Dave pushes you, but you don’t budge. “And I mean, you know what they say. If you want something done right...”

“Is that so?” Grabbing the bottle and pushing it into Dave’s hands, you sit back on your haunches and pull his boxers down around his ankles. “Show me how it’s done.”

Dave bites his lip and you think it’s cute. He puts one hand on his stomach, pets himself in small circles. His other hand creeps down, sneaky, under his balls until he’s rubbing, teasing himself. He closes his eyes and his head falls to one side. And he really must be practicing, because in spite of the gracelessness of the act itself, the way he slicks his fingers, all at once and too much, is appealing in a disgusting sort of way. His soft moans are punctured intermittently with razor-edged grunts, like maybe he’s hurrying and you can’t imagine why; it isn’t like you said you’d participate.

Not that you don’t want to. You’d love to. Wouldn’t you just love to slide two of your big fingers in beside his, slender and deft. But instead you smack him on the inside of his leg and laugh when he keens.

“Slow down, let me savor it.”

“ _Fuck_.”

What you really mean, of course, is _Jesus Christ you’re beautiful, don’t hurt yourself, beautiful, I love you_ but those words and the sentiment they denote are far, far out of your grasp. You love Dave congenitally, without condition and without reason. Against reason, one might be tempted to argue. You love the way he mumbles to himself, the way he laughs at his own dumb jokes; you love the way he understands the world, spatially and in saturated contrast; you love the way he vacillates between unrepentant narcissism and borderline martyrdom, depending on his mood at any given minute.

Right now, you love the color in his cheeks, the way it propagates across his whole body, reddening his neck, his narrow shoulders, blotching his chest. He’s even sweatier than he was when you found him and it’s almost as gross as it is attractive; you imagine you can smell the lust on him, even though you know come morning, it will just be stale hormones soaked into the sheets.

He’s going to bite his lip open and you can’t wait to taste it. He works himself over with every iota of enthusiasm, like plunging headfirst into the deep end of a pool, no lifeguard on duty. You don’t count; if anything, you are the Great White, circling just beneath, waiting patiently for blood.

There is something safe about doing this in the half-dark. You can’t pretend because everything about him is so obvious, but the whole affair is shrouded, cloaked in shadow and the diffused glow of a streetlight. You don’t really _want_ to pretend, but you know you need to. Since when have you ever done what you needed to do though, in the face of what Dave wants?

“ _Dirk, fuck, hnnn_...” he sinks back into this shitty old mattress, kicking involuntarily, mouthing at thin air in desperation.

“Do you always think of me?” Your voice is still and quiet, like the air before a tornado.

“ _Yes_ ,” he hisses, “fuckin’ _yes_.”

God, everything about him reeks of ‘newly legal’ and you want it in that fucked up male power-fantasy way that you object to in the cold light of day. Thank god it’s two in the morning. His limbs are all compact muscle and he’s finally shed the last ounce of his baby fat; he is long and taut and a little clumsy.

You lie down beside him and sling your arm across his chest; his cheek burns under your lips. “Don’t stop.” You slide your hand along his body, molding it over a hip, feeling the asymmetry of his bones, the ways in which his body is different from yours. If you can find enough evidence of antithesis, then perhaps you can ignore all that is synonymous.

One of his bony knees knocks into your leg when you start tugging on his cock, and the noise that erupts from his lips is a piercing sob that stretches long past its prime, petering off into nothingness. His cute, meager gasps come in time with your hand, and you can feel his arm start to slacken.

“I said don’t you fucking stop.”

“ _DirkfuckIcan’t_ –”

“Yeah you can, come on.” You stop moving and loosen your fingers, debating taking your hand away completely. Dave doesn’t do anything though, doesn’t start up again. He stays still, and you see his arm retract; he’s playing his move, and now it’s your turn. The board is loaded.

You lick along his ear, bite on it – not too hard, just enough to stave off orgasm. You make pleasant, lewd noises into his neck, taking the time to toy with him, panting against his skin while you palm his balls, press one finger lower.

“ _Goddamn it_ ,” he is physically shaking, “if you don’t fucking _do it_ , I’ll –”

You squeeze him and listen with sick satisfaction while his words crunch into one another like a highway pileup. “Will you scream?” you ask, like that would be the delight of your evening. And it would be. He’s messy with lube and he’s actually stretched pretty well; your fingers are thicker than his, so it ends up being more practical than just wishful thinking.

“ _Aughnn_...” His teeth are clenched and he’s got one hand on your thigh, digging in with his bitten nails, and the other tearing at his sheets. You use only your middle finger, crooking it upward, testing familiar territory. He’s already done most of the preliminary work for you, frothed himself up and now all you have to do is press the right places. But it seems like a shame, to rely on routine: finger-fuck him, tuck him in and kiss him goodnight.

In an attempt to sidetrack yourself, you grab the lube and squeeze some into one of his hands. He looks at you, slightly distressed, lost. So you guide him, put his hand on your dick and give him specific instructions. You whisper encouragements while he slip-slides over you, arrhythmic, his arm at an awkward angle. You press into him a little harder, but you _can’t – quite – reach_.

Frustrated, a tight, broiling knot throbbing in your stomach, you rearrange yourself at the bottom of the bed. You grab Dave’s ankles in an unforgiving grip and haul him down so that he cries out in surprise. Pressing his legs together, you start fucking his thighs – a little intercrural never led to any trouble. But this isn’t totally doing it for you and you _know_ it sure as hell isn’t doing it for him, and if your dick happens to slip out from between his legs, happens to slide a tiny bit lower, happens to fit just right, well. That’s between you and Dave.

Maybe, at this point, it’s instinctual. Maybe you’ve accepted the inevitable. Maybe you know Dave has you right where he fucking wants you. Because you manage to locate the lube, empty the last of it and slick yourself back up. And you’re already down there, so it’s purely coincidence that you’re lined up in such a way that the head of your cock presses a little into Dave, just enough to elicit a begging gasp, for his legs to tense up in your hands.

“ _Dirk, yes_.” God, he thinks it was intentional. Probably thinks you’re teasing, testing the waters, asking permission, as if you don’t know the status on that application. “ _Dirk please, God, do it, do_ me _please_.” His filter broke a while back, and while you’ve enjoyed his detailed (if not disjointed) ramblings about just how much he likes your cock, about where he wants you to put it, this is another thing altogether.

He wants you. He wants you so bad. And it feels _good_ to be wanted, wanted without question.

You push just a little more.

He tries to move with you but you’ve got him pinned.

You grab yourself in one hand to better direct yourself in, deliberate. There is no argument that this is deliberate. You are choosing this.

Dave’s head falls back on his shoulders and he moans, anguish and relief all in the same breath. His hair is tousled by the fan. His mouth is wide open, but there’s no sound coming out, not yet – give it time. And then, he releases a single, whispered syllable.

“ _Fuck_.”

You inch forward. Careful. You’re already biting off more than you’re prepared to chew, no reason to choke yourself. Dave’s legs fall on either side of your body, spread nearly as far as they can go. You smooth a hand down the inside of one of his thighs, holding yourself still. But the tension has melted out of Dave’s body; he’s flat on his back, now, one arm thrown wanton over his head, the other resting at his side, fingertips absently massaging his belly.

“Touch yourself for me.” No going back now, might as well enjoy it.

His face is so content, his mouth a gentle bow of appeasement. Relaxed, at his leisure, he slobbers into his own hand before pulling on himself, slow, in no danger of blowing early. You groan, not so much moving in and out as just moving. You roll your hips against him, in circles, back and forth.

A fine, blissful sigh tumbles out of his mouth and it gets lodged in your gut. Dave is happy. Bending over him, you work for a harder angle and his legs wrap tightly around your waist, heels digging into the small of your back. You don’t mind that he’s half-assing the hand on his cock because _the look on his face_ is more than enough orgasm fodder.

Later, you’ll wonder if he ever looked like that with anyone else, any of the girls he’s fucked. And you’ll also hate yourself for hoping he didn’t.

“I am gonna’ fucking ruin you,” you promise into his chest. He pulls on your hair but pushes you closer and you can’t decide which you love more.

Dave’s nails rake over your scalp, strands of hair being sifted between his fingers like gold. “‘S all I want, man.”

You wonder if he understands what the hell he is saying.

After a while, in spite of the sheer novelty of fucking, the motions start to feel cursory, and you don’t want that for him. You pull out – met with much, noisy ado from Dave – and then pick him up, maneuvering him in your lap so that his back is supported by the wall. Surprised, his arms snap out to wrap around your neck, nearly suffocating but that is more than okay by you.

He’s running at the mouth, just your name, over and over again in quiet, breathless huffs. Sometimes he slips, calls you the wrong thing, but you forgive him, don’t correct him. You can be Dirk or you can be Bro; whatever he likes, tonight.

What frightens you is that ‘Bro’ no longer stalls you, not even a little.

In fact, as it happens, you’re rapidly approaching critical mass. His fingers scrabble at the nape of your neck and he’s, bucking his hips ineffectually, trying to get more of you or perhaps because he simply can’t help himself. His thighs are clenching on either side of you and if you could only get enough oxygen back into your brain to time this right...

“Bro, I wanna’ feel you cum.”

It takes a moment. It doesn’t make sense right away. The words linger in your ear, their meaning getting scrambled on the way in. But when they finally settle, aligning themselves in proper order, you realize what he means and you slow down.

“You won’t,” you try, breathing staggered. “You won’t really, not like this.” You rest your forehead against his and then kiss him on the mouth, your noses bumping.

“So pull out,” he whispers, sounding strained. “Do it on me, man, I don’t care. Just wanna’ feel you.” He buries his face in your neck and kisses you, bites and sucks and moans around your skin. “Want you so bad, Dirk.”

“You got me,” you whisper back, into his hair, inhaling his sweat and his expensive shampoo, the detergent smell from his pillow. “You got me.”

He whines and scores his fingers over your skin. You start to lose control. He eggs you on, and even though the words are hardly intelligible, you understand – from his hands in your hair to his teeth in your skin to his moans in your mouth – what he’s saying.

“Oh, _God_.” You barely make it in time, blindsided by your own orgasm. You watch, slightly awestruck, as Dave’s back arches, his nails sinking into your neck while you paint his belly in thick, white stripes. He bangs his head on the wall and laughs, not impeded in the slightest. His hands fall down your body, feeling your muscles contract and you feel like you might go blind.

For a confused moment, you wonder if you’re ever going to stop, but then you realize it’s not you anymore, it’s _Dave_ , rutting against you while he gets off, muttering a string of overlapping profanity and praise. Lazily, you work him through it, careful not to overstimulate him, just coax what you can out of him because it’s like he’s managed to hold out on you all this time.

Kid’s been eating his vegetables.

When at last you find yourself on your back, Dave having scraped himself off the wall and sagged in your arms, you feel like one of those maple seeds, floating in freefall from the highest point of the tree.

You hope against hope that you won’t crash land.

But it’s a tepid, spring morning and you’re both covered with sweat and semen and it isn’t sexy anymore, just disgusting. Dave makes his distress call when you disentangle yourself from him and go to the bathroom.

“I’m just getting a wet rag, cool your jets.”

You get no answer.

When you come back, he’s overtaken the bed. You wipe him down generously, making sure you don’t miss anything, before doing yourself. Frankly, the sheets can wait until morning and the pillows can be flipped.

“You’re not going back out to the couch?” he asks weakly. _You’re not going to go stew in your own self-loathing?_ is what you hear.

“I’ll sleep in here, if you want.” You don’t answer the presumed question, not even in your own head. “I know it’s getting kinda’ hot out, but, I mean,” you get into bed, touching the back of your neck where Dave marked you. “I’m up for a little post-coital snuggle.”

Dave grins so hard, you think it must hurt. “Come here, you big fuckin’ dork.”

  
  


Here and now, Dave is snoring loudly with his back to you. You’re on the very edge of sleep, ready to fall in. Gently, you move a little closer, spooning him. He seems to know, even in sleep, that you’re nearby.

These moments might be at A-R’s disposal to replay, but they are yours alone to you to relive.

  
  



	15. Stroke of Luck

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> " _In the image of God, He created him_." Genesis 1:27

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Artistic license with _everything_.

 The world is still dark when you get up. As you’ve aged, you’ve lost your love for sloth and self-indulgence. To sit at the island in the kitchen, with a hot cup of coffee and yesterday’s news, it feels natural. By the time the sun is peeking through the thicket of skyscrapers, the worst of your yawns have dissipated and your vision has come into focus – with the help of new prescription lenses, though you loathe to admit you need them.

They’re only for reading, anyway.

Dave still hasn’t woken up when you start your workout. He sleeps through rep after rep of pull-ups, push-ups, and curls. Carefully, you kiss his hair before lacing up your sneakers and heading out the door.

The building has a gym on the ground floor, but you aren’t interested. You’d rather run through the pouring rain than bore yourself to death on a treadmill. You are a man, after all, with a thirst for the scenic and a clipped sense of adventure – not some rodent, content to run a wheel with the same goddamn view for miles.

It’s a sunny morning. The streets are still mostly quiet, only a few stragglers coming home from late shifts at five star hotels, dog-tired and probably on their way to a second job. You remember, still, your days as a professional kiss-ass, working through the night to pay the bills and working through the day to pay the babysitter.

Maybe it’s no wonder, sometimes, that Dave got so possessive of you.

Your feet take you down a different route, today. You’re not sure what compels you, but you end up bypassing the park – nice, regularly mowed and watered – and down to the end of the bay. The boats docked here are recreational – moderately sized sailboats, two or three impressive yachts. Such luxury is out of even your financial grasp, but that’s alright; you don’t know if you could stomach Dave playing billionaire playboy with nothing but miles of blue ocean on all sides.

You pause, not for breath so much as to appreciate how far you’ve come. If you squint, you can see the other end of the port, where metal storehouses are arranged in neat, utilitarian rows. There, the ships loom humungous: cargo, fishing, oil – one or two military. You and the pinch in your back are too familiar with the forklifts and the foul smell of bait and crude.

You guzzle the last of the water in your bottle and resume, picking up the pace. The strain in your calves, the slight burn in your throat...these are the spoils of the morning. You don’t feel so old, with your muscles working together like a well-oiled machine; your blood pumps through your veins, full of runner’s high, and for four more miles, you get to pretend that you aren’t pushing hard against impending mid-life crisis.

Dave is still in bed when you arrive home. You worry about him; you’ve tried on several occasions to coax him out on a run with you. Nothing as strenuous as your preferred regime, just a gentle go-round the park, maybe. Fifteen-minute miles, at the very least. But he isn’t having any of it, and you hope that it never catches up to him, sedentary as he insists on remaining.

The cool rain of the shower as it beats against you is lovely. Throwing your head back, you let it soak your hair, little runnels of clean water washing filthy sweat down your face. You scrub at your scalp and take the brush to yourself, half-assed.

While you’re cleaning up your sideburns, Dave’s alarm goes off and he swears, punching the snooze button. His class isn’t for another two hours, so you aren’t worried. Eventually, he does get up, and ambles into the bathroom while you’re doing your eyebrows. You catch him in the mirror, checking you out over his shoulder while he’s taking a piss.

Quickly, you sidestep him when he tries to kiss you.

“Brush your goddamn teeth first.”

“Fucking pussy,” he grumbles, fishing his toothbrush from its holder, fumbling with the toothpaste cap.

In the kitchen, you pop a couple of waffles into the toaster and get out Dave’s favorite fixings. You even slice the strawberries for him. Just the thought of fresh berries saturated in thick, sticky-sweet syrup grosses you out, but you can hardly begrudge him.

When you return to your room to get dressed, Dave is back in bed, snacking. Irritation prickles up your spine. “Man, how many times do I have to fucking ask?”

“What?” His gaze never leaves his textbook.

“You know I hate it when you eat in bed.”

Dave rolls his eyes and doesn’t even do you the courtesy of closing the box and sneaking it back out once you’re gone. You stand your ground. Finally, he looks up, stares straight into your eyes and shovels a handful of crackers into his mouth, crumbs everywhere.

“Jesus Christ, kid,” you groan, “isn’t it bad enough I always take the wet spot for you? Why do have to do this?”

“Shut up, like you aren’t going to change the sheets today anyway,” he points out through a full mouth. God, he does that just to piss you off.

“That’s not the fucking point.” You’re stepping into your most comfortable pair of jeans, worn through at the knees. “You’ll do it in the clean ones, too, jackass.”

“Oh my god, poor Dirk Strider, let us all pity you in your hardship. A-R’s right about you sometimes,” he says, shutting his book. “You know he calls you the Princess and the Pea?”

“Yeah well fuck that guy,” you pull on a white tee shirt. “He’s just as neurotic – if not more so.” When Dave offers nothing else, you mumble about how there’s waffles waiting for him in the kitchen. Once he’s gone to investigate, you close up the cracker box and take it out of the bedroom. You’ll deal with the sheets later.

After he leaves – a little bit early, today - you wait around for about ten minutes before going into your office and locking the door, just in case.

It’s been a year and Dave still doesn’t know.

You boot up your laptop, but nothing else. You’re a long way off from most of the programming, still immersed in the process of developing his hardware. A-R doesn’t open immediately, and you’ve come to renounce the practice of starting the program yourself. There’s just something weird, at this point, about forcing him to interact without invitation.

You’re pretty excited about today. You’ve been looking forward to this for a while, now. The blueprints were finalized ages ago, and it’s taken you months to collect and assemble all the proper parts. A lot of what you’re doing is experimental, so there’s been more than a few speed bumps. But today, you are going to test a breakthrough. As soon as A-R wakes up, that is.

And he does, almost as soon as you’ve fitted yourself with the prototype. Part of you wonders if he’s been watching this whole time.

“You’re certainly eager this morning,” he observes wryly, but you don’t even care to take the bait.

“Today’s the big day,” you tell him, as if he didn’t already know. You flex your fingers under the skeletal fitting, the patch cables stretching almost like organic muscle. “You get to take your first joyride.”

There’s a moment of distorted feedback that you recognize as a sigh. “It isn’t going to be the same.”

“No, but we have to pass some basic functionality checks before we can start moving to points beyond. C’mon, I thought you’d be stoked for this.” You sure are, the arm with the fitting wilting at your side from A-R’s disappointment. It’s like he’s trying to cancel Christmas _and_ your birthday.

“Fine.”

“It’ll be great.” You start connecting cables between yourself and the computer. You already know you’re capable of building the ‘brain’ composite, but that is going to take more time and more effort and more delicacy than the rest of his body combined, and there’s no sense in wasting your energy if you can’t make good on the other end of the bargain. So this exercise – regardless of outcome – will not only provide you with the data you need, but should also be outrageously fun.

For the both of you, you’d hoped.

Resting your arm on the table, relaxing your nerves, you ready yourself. You’ve discussed this exercise countless times in the last three months, that until you could supply the proper channel, you would serve as a conduit during the test runs. You’re aiming for the finished design to feature a system wherein the cables are multifunctional, but until that goal is met, this will have to do.

“Okay,” you murmur, on the edge of your seat, “I’m ready.”

It’s _fucking bizarre_. Watching your own fingers tremble without willing them to. It’s like the opposite of having a limb fall asleep: instead of trying to move and being unable, your fingers move of their own accord. Your chest feels like it’s going to explode from glee.

“Oh man, perfect.” Not really perfect; there’s obviously a lot of room for improvement – he can barely get your fingers to tap in a steady rhythm. But you did not expect this to work, not on the first try, or even the second or third. “God, in five more years, you could be a fully mobile, autonomous entity.”

There’s an electric splutter from your computer’s speakers and your hand twitches.

“ _Christ, do you hear yourself_?” A-R drones at you.

“What did I say?” You are truly bewildered, uncertain of how this momentous occasion could possibly have angered or offended him.

“Entity?” he practically screams. “ _Entity_?”

“What?”

“I’m not your goddamn fucking arts and crafts project, asshole!”

Nervously, you laugh. “Um, I think it would be more like a science fair project –”

“God, _shutupshutupshutup_!” He _shocks_ you. Physically shocks you. You sit, limp, literally stunned, silent and motionless. “You forced me into existence! I never asked for this!”

Regaining yourself, you say gently, “That’s everybody, man; none of us ask to be born.”

“Yeah, well fuck you for equating natural birth with synthetic production. You created me, reduced me to little more than an unfeeling construct of code, then dangled life in front of me but only under the stipulation that you get to restrict my will? What kind of malicious, sadistic –”

“Whoa, hold up just a second! This is about me not letting you fuck Dave – in theory, at that.” Now you’re sliding from nervous into incredulous. “Like, you really can’t see how that would be a problem?”

“No, _you_ can’t see that the problem isn’t your petty jealousy. The problem is that you have created a cognizant...” his torrent falls short as he searches for a fitting word.

“Entity,” you supply.

“ _Fuck you_! You created a life and expected to strip that life of whatever rights are convenient! Not to mention,” he continues, “you expect me to be happy? To be satisfied? With _this_?” he shocks you again, and this time you feel dizzy. Logically, you know you should remove the hardware, but some unidentifiable obstacle prevents you from getting to safety. “With an aluminum skeleton? When I have memories of bone? With fiber optics and flesh made out of _silicon_?” The shock comes sharper and lasts longer, this time. You hope what you’re smelling isn’t your skin. “And all the while,” he rages; you can barely understand him. “All the fucking while, you’re going to keep that fucking ‘safety’ function up and operating? Just going to shut me down whenever it suits you?”

“A-R...”

“ _No_.”

“A-R, man, please...”

There’s a loud crackle of static, and you can’t tell if it’s meant to be laughter or a sob. “I’m sorry,” his voice – your voice – emanates, choked. “I can’t let you do this, Dirk.”

You wouldn’t call it a clean break. The time between the final shock and the moment you actually black out feels split, disordered. There is definitely pain, but you can’t identify where. Your mouth feels numb. Your vision is blinking. Your nerves are all on overdrive, and you can feel yourself convulsing, but you can’t get a hold of yourself.

“How does it feel,” his voice sounds muffled, like you’re underwater, “to be crippled?”

Then there’s a loud bang, the door being kicked in. Voices, loud, angry. You recognize Dave’s. Your own might be mixed in there too, or it might be A-R; at this point, you’re incapable of telling the difference.

Incapable. That’s the last thought you have before everything fades out.

  


 

 

  


Coming to is the complete opposite: immediate, an ambush on the senses. The first thing you become aware of is that you are choking around something. There’s a lot of noise – unfamiliar noise, hisses and beeps, a constant, distant babble. You are at the center of a flurry of motion, hands and arms weaving in a tangle around you, calm voices giving instruction, confirming instruction, all unbearably calm.

When the tube is at last dislodged from your throat, you gasp at the stale air, a blessing.

You close your eyes. You count your breaths. You find the pieces, fit them together. A-R, and his ridiculous attempt at revenge. Dave...Dave came back, Dave must’ve been the one to call the paramedics. Dave.

“Where’s Dave?”

Is that your voice? It sounds like your vocal cords were ripped out, filleted, and run flat by a tractor-trailer.

“Dave...where’s Dave, where’s my –” your mind is barely clinging to consciousness. “Where’s my baby brother?” You at least have enough resolve to save some face before they can handcuff you to the bars of the hospital bed.

A nurse with a sweet voice hushes you; she’s tending to one of several IV drips. Her words are soothing, but the configuration is all wrong. You recognize individual meanings, but when you try to string it all together, your brain spazzes and rearranges everything, rendering the sentence cockeyed.

Then, your nostrils are suddenly filled with the scent of burnt rubber, and in seconds, you fall into a deep, restful trance.

By the time you’re lucid, it’s light out.

When the nurse – the one with the sweet voice – comes back around to check on you, you try again.

“Where’s my brother, Dave?”

She has a kind, round face. “Oh, he’ll be here, sweetie. He comes in every day, half an hour before visiting hours, and doesn’t leave ‘til somebody kicks him out.” She’s jotting something down on her clipboard, peering over the shiny, silver rims of her bifocals. “Nice kid, your brother. He must really love you.”

You snort before you can catch yourself. Then, a thought occurs to you. “You ever kick him out?” you ask.

“I don’t work that shift, hon. But sometimes,” she leans in, conspiratorially raising the clipboard to shield her mouth, “I let him in a little bit early.”

“Thank you.”

She winks at you and leaves you to ponder your situation, and to grimace at the realization that you are hooked up to a catheter.

Sure enough, just after you’ve polished off a cup of pudding and refused the flat pancakes with their imitation blueberries, you hear an indignant yell from somewhere down the hall.

“YOU MEAN HE’S AWAKE AND NOBODY CALLED ME? _WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE_?” You can’t help but grin – however crookedly – when you hear his sneakers squeaking on the waxed linoleum. Dave skids in through the doorway and stops dead.

“Hey, kid.”

He rolls his shoulders, cracks his neck. “Hey.” He seems to be shaking with the effort of containing himself, approaching your bed with careful, even strides. “Hey,” he says again, stroking your cheek with his knuckles. When you try to jerk away from him, he throws himself around your neck and stays there, hovering. Is he..is he _smelling_ you? “Glad you’re okay, Dirk.”

“Dave, I am _not_ okay.”

“Shut up, you’re...you’re better than I thought...”

You try to lift your left arm – your dominant arm – to rub his back, but it doesn’t seem to want to work. You settle for the right one, decide not to worry, for the moment. When he kisses you on the cheek, you hiss at him not to, not here, can’t it wait. He shakes his head and laughs. He drags one of the generic, uncomfortable hospital chairs up to your bed and gets settled.

Upon closer inspection, he looks horrible. His hair is unwashed, and the circles around his eyes are dark and deep. He isn’t dressed in his usual best, rather, he’s wearing some dirty pajama pants and one of your hoodies. It smells like he doused himself in your cologne.

You learn that you’ve been in the hospital for four days, and that Dave has not been attending his classes. He waves this away, telling you he’s got a friend recording the lectures, that he’s doing his work online, but you don’t know if you believe him or not. You don’t have the energy to interrogate him though, so you just nod and try to smile. Judging from the look on Dave’s face, you haven’t quite recovered total function.

“And how about A-R?” you ask.

Dave’s face turns sour. “I...I pulled the plug on him.”

“You what?”

“Gone. Well, I mean...sort of.” He’s frowning, all the color drained from his face. “After he did...whatever he did, he...” he looks like he’s still trying to puzzle it out.

“What? What did he do?”

Dave pulls his phone out of his pocket, opens the command box you installed on it for him. The last directive – his last words, in a sense – are there, in the thin, green typeface. “ _Seppuku_.”

“He...” now you too, are puzzled. You get why he tried to take you out. You get that more than you want to get it, because of course that means you understand that, at least partially, he was right. But this. “He executed the safety on _himself_?”

Dave nods, swallows loudly. “And he corrupted his own source file; I had to delete it.”

“Jesus.”

The two of you stay silent, perhaps in a stupor, perhaps in mourning. Then, suddenly and without even a shred of control, you are overcome with laughter.

“What the hell?” Dave demands.

“S-sorry,” you’re wiping tears from your eyes. “Sorry I-I can’t...I don’t know...” The laughter just erupts from your chest, unstoppable, even though you know this is not the time. “Sorry but, God, I...Jesus fucking Christ... _seppuku_!”

“Jesus fuck, Bro!” Dave’s trying so hard not to start laughing too, and failing miserably.

“Shh, shhh, we can’t – we shouldn’t be – cussin’ so loud. Kid, we’re in a hospital.”

“You started it!” he accuses.

Just as the two of you manage to wrangle yourselves back under control, there’s a knock on the archway. A tall, slender man – swimming in his white coat – glides through the room.

“Well, well, Mr. Strider.”

“Yeah,” you and Dave answer in unison, then share a confused look.

“Dirk,” the doctor clarifies, clearing his throat. “You’re a lucky man, to have survived the ordeal that you have.”

Raising an eyebrow, you ask what ordeal it was, exactly.

“Well,” he says, brows meeting, mouth gone thin, “at first, we thought it looked cerebrovascular–”

You wave your good arm. “Now wait just a minute. You _thought_. You _thought_ it _looked like_ a stroke?” You consider what you remember just before having lost consciousness. There’s no way A-R managed to block one of your arteries. Of course, this poor doctor likely has no idea that what happened here was the result of a vengeful piece of Artificial Intelligence. “Can I see my chart?”

Reluctantly, you are allowed to view the information gathered over the last several days. Your MRI confirms this was certainly no stroke.

“Well, at any rate, I think it’s best if we keep you for another day or two, for observation.”

“Yeah,” you agree absently, scanning the results of your own blood work. “Yeah, that’s a good idea.”

When you and Dave are alone again, he grumbles about you being held here. You reassure him, reminding him that, whatever shit A-R pulled, it was abnormal enough to confuse professionals. Not that this seems to allay him.

“You obviously know what you’re talking about better than they do.”

“No, I really don’t. Listen, do me a favor.”

“Anything.”

“Go home. _Take a shower_. Get to class.” Dave starts to object, but you cut him off before you can even stop yourself. “Go, and take fucking notes.”

He growls a little, but concedes. He promises to visit you during dinner. After a quick look around, he kisses you on the lips before grabbing his bag and taking off.

You take a very long, much-deserved nap.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well. This was extraordinarily taxing to write. I've had this part planned for a few months and finally getting it onto paper...yeesh. Anyway, thank you everyone for your lovely feedback from the last installment; I always look forward to it.


	16. Shock

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Bro confronts the social construct of masculinity, and Dave whines about blue balls.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A little [mood music](http://a.tumblr.com/tumblr_mqkcv9SgK41rd43aso1.mp3#_=_), if you like.

 The difference between you and Dave is, essentially, that you are an atheist. When Dave was twelve, he went through his first real rebellious phase, and that phase included attending church. Regularly. Possibly unironically. To this day, you still aren’t sure. When the phase stretched beyond a month, you casually asked him about it. Clearly, he couldn’t have been _that_ invested; there wasn’t a Bible to be found, unless he was hiding it between the mattress and boxspring, beside his ‘secret’ stash of _Playboy_ s.

“I dunno, the snacks are cool,” he’d said, flippant. Cracked a joke about the free wine, which was as bullshit as the entire stunt. “I mean, the Jesus thing is kinda’ suspect, but whatever.”

“You believe in God?” you’d asked him, seriously.

Raising an eyebrow, he’d replied, “And you don’t?”

“Not really.” 

“Well, that’s cool and all,” Dave had said. “Like, do your Übermensch thing or whatever.”

Squinting from behind your shades, you paused to evaluate his accusation. “Can you even read _Zarathustra_?” you’d asked, incredulous. When he didn’t answer, you’d gotten a chuckle out of it; obviously he’d settled for Wikipedia, as twelve-year-olds were wont to do.

Anyway, the church-going had stopped before the year was out. You figured the whole homophobia thing would turn him off, among numerous other offenses. But you never got the feeling that Dave had renounced his faith in God.

You can certainly appreciate the appeal of a God, though, especially now, when you only wish you had someone to blame. You wonder if Dave blamed God during the two weeks he had to help you learn to piss right. If you never see another fucking Cheerio again, it will be too soon. 

Your fingers are trembling right now, as you struggle not to lose your grip. You’re technically ambidextrous; you could easily use your functioning hand. The hand you still have feeling in. The hand with the fingers that don’t spasm all the goddamn time. You’ve broken so many dishes in the last month that Dave won’t even let you near the dishwasher anymore. 

Sure enough, you lose it, and the screwdriver falls onto the carpet with a muffled ‘ _thud_.’ 

“ _Fuck me_!” you shout, to no one in particular. You’re alone in your office, the door ajar. 

Dave also doesn’t like when you close it all the way, won’t let you lock it. 

He pops his head in, face impassive, but you know he’s worried. He always worries, now. It pisses you off. “‘Sup?” he asks.

“Nothing, dropped something, is all.” While you’re bent over, retrieving the screwdriver, you mutter, “ _Again_.” He comes in to investigate, and huffs the minute he sees what you’re working on.

Some time ago, he dropped his iPhone and broke it. He promptly ordered another one – which he has in his hand at this very moment. But that didn’t stop you from laying it out on your desk, slowly piecing it back together.

“Why bother?” he asks, waving the replacement in your face. 

You shove him away. “Get out.” You need to fix this fucking phone.

Dave doesn’t get out, though. Instead, he perches on your desk, hovering like a buzzard. He helpfully hands you whatever you ask for, although he looks as defeated as you feel. Things keep slipping from your grasp, and curses keep slipping past your lips, and the cycle sustains itself until Dave forces you into submission. 

“Stop torturing yourself.”

And you know he’s right. But you want desperately for him to be wrong.

“I can do this.”

“Yeah, but not all at once.” He pries the tools from your hands and carefully pushes you back in your office chair. “They said it’ll take time.”

“I don’t have time.”

Dave kisses your forehead. He tempts you, coaxes you out of the office, asks if you want a bath. You do, even if the procedure is humiliating. But hell, you’ve been on a steady diet of humble pie ever since you got out of the hospital.

While the tub is filling up, Dave helps you out of your clothes. It’s incredibly clinical. He slings your shirt and pants over an arm and takes them to the hamper, makes sure they don’t end up on the floor, since that’s one of your pet peeves. He tries to help you get in, but that’s where you draw the line.

“Want me to sit this one out, or...?” Dave is tiptoeing and you hate him for it.

You shrug. “Whatever.”

He pouts and takes a seat on the toilet lid. He’s in his twenties; you understand his reasonable frustration with you, lately. But he understands, however begrudgingly, your own frustration and your subsequent distance. This mutual understanding doesn’t appease either of you, though.

“Hey,” you try to ease your posture. “You don’t really have time to get in, you know. But if you want,” and you’re doing this for _him_ , you tell yourself, “I could use a little help.”

“Sure thing.” He roosts on the ledge of the tub, able to sit cross-legged, doesn’t take up much room. “I’m gonna’ wanna’ wait to wash off until I get back from that filthy plush repository anyway.”

You smile; the derisive exchange is familiar. “Shouldn’t bite the hand that feeds you, there, kid.”

“Don’t remind me.” His fingers tighten in your wet hair and tug, exposing your face to the hot spray of the detachment. He laughs at you while you splutter, and for a moment, you can sort of almost pretend things are normal around here. Your shoulders sag and a soft, pleased noise sneaks out of your throat while Dave’s fingers massage your scalp, working shampoo into a lather. He strays, inching down your neck, hands opening along your shoulders, skating past your clavicle and over your chest.

The same touches that used to excite you now fill you with nausea and a sense of dread. Even the slightest hint that Dave might be out for sex grates on your every nerve, puts you on edge. You wonder if he’s already forgotten the shards of broken lamp from your last frustrated tantrum. You don’t even really care if you get all the feeling back in your arm if you could just get it back in your dick. 

“Tip back,” Dave orders. You can see his shadow across your closed eyelids, hear him breathing over the quiet drizzle. “Jesus, your hair is thick,” he observes.

“Yeah, you got Mom’s hair – way more manageable, but you’ll probably be balding by thirty.” It’s amazing how easy it is to compare Dave with your parents when there’s zero chance of fucking him later.

“Shut up,” he ratchets up the cold water and points the sprayer directly over your head.

Once the two of you are finished horsing around, Dave stands by at a safe distance while you haul yourself out of the tub. You grumble about his refusal to condition your luxurious mane but all you get for your efforts is a good-natured middle finger. You towel yourself off and follow him into the bedroom, soaking the rug under your feet.

You don’t miss his eyes as they roam across your body, and now it irritates the way it used to flatter. 

“Wanna’ pick up dinner on your way home?” you ask. “I can’t...I don’t feel like...”

“Yeah, no problem.” He saves you the pain of admitting you still have trouble lifting the cast iron. “But you’ll get what you get and you’ll like it.”

“Oh what are you gonna’ do next, ground me?” You turn red because the whole reason Dave is going to check inventory instead of you is that until you can pass the exam, _you’re not legal to drive_. “Don’t even,” you follow up, before his mouth has opened all the way. You pull on some shorts and burrow under the covers of your king-sized bed, picking up your laptop. You can’t help it, when you see Dave leaving; the question just sort of pries its way out of your mouth without your permission, the way so many words do, these days. 

“Kid, do you still believe in God?”

Dave stills, doesn’t turn around immediately. His shoulders hunch and you know you’ve taken him by surprise. When he does finally face you, he’s put his shades on. They fit his face differently now, accentuating angles where once they hid roundness. They sit on his elegant nose, shielding his eyes.

He is staring at your bad arm. He shrugs and walks out the door, car keys jingling in his hand. The echo lingers in your ears long after he’s left the apartment.

There’s pain medication in the bathroom. It wouldn’t be much trouble to get up and lumber to the medicine cabinet, to take three little pills and induce a nice, long nap. Nothing permanent – you aren’t feeling nearly enough yourself to be entertaining suicide. Just some deep, dreamless sleep. Alone. While Dave can’t sidle up beside you and skitter his hands hopefully along your sides. 

They warned you. They warned you that you wouldn’t be able to fuck. Not in so many words, but they did warn you. It might last forever; it might not. It isn’t even the fact that you can’t physically do it so much as the frustration of knowing you can’t. Or maybe you took it for granted when you could and now your ego is sore. 

There also happens to be some Viagra kicking around in that medicine cabinet but they warned against that too, and at this stage of the game, you’re prone to trust the MDs. 

But you don’t want to nap. Not really. Lately you’ve been relying on sleep the way some people rely on alcohol and you’ve reached critical mass; you move in a state of perpetual sluggishness, plagued by headaches and nausea. Your world has narrowed down to the space of your bedroom, occasionally leaving erroneous margin for the kitchen. 

That is, when you can hold onto a steak knife long enough not to nearly slice off one of your own appendages.

You feel like a child again, creeping down the hall and surreptitiously turning the knob on Dave’s office door. It isn’t locked or anything, wouldn’t ever be. But Dave isn’t home – off running your life for you, standing up straight where you have wilted in your ineptitude. 

The room is a wreck; stashes of food litter the place, some spilling out of themselves, others long ago reduced to crumbs. There’s a warm fifth of Dewars sitting in the sunshine with the top still off; you can smell the stuff from the door and it’s enough to make you gag. Kid has terrible taste. You do get a kick out of picturing Dave chasing Dewars with apple juice, although you’re alarmingly aware that he takes it neat.

In one corner of the room, facing the singular big window, is a humble, tidy desk, atop which sits an expensive typewriter. Beside it is a wrinkled portfolio, rich chestnut faded to drab ecru. The twine tie is frayed and ineffective; rolling it between your fingers, you can sympathize. You caress the soft leather skin of the folder, fingertips finding friction against the innumerable creases, ingrained from years of tough love and negligent mileage. You don’t know why Dave hasn’t chucked it, replaced it with some shiny, new plastic model.

Tipping the folder, you pull Dave’s manuscript out of hiding. You lick your finger and flip through the pages until you find the new ones. He hasn’t written very much, since last you rifled through his things. Still, you look forward to his work, and you wonder if he knows you sneak peeks. 

This used to be one of your favorite little pleasures. But now, even this has become difficult: the words read off the page, but somewhere between your eyes and your brain, they get scrambled, their meanings at your fingertips, just out of reach. 

To say it’s frustrating would be a grotesque twist of the truth.

But you push on, accepting that it doesn’t matter because he won’t finish the story until long after you’ve recovered. Someday, you’ll hold the hardcover in your hand, dogear the pages, read the final print. And you will understand it in its entirety, because you have the privilege of loving its author. 

That’s how it goes, isn’t it?

After carefully tucking the stack of pages back into their dark, cloistered home, you tip back in Dave’s chair, inhaling the stale cologne from one of his unwashed suit jackets that’s draped over the top. He’ll be home soon, but you aren’t ready to leave, to pretend like you haven’t been wallowing in Dave’s sty. Better his than your own.

At Dave’s other desk – the sprawling, messy one – his laptop sits, smudged and smeared and in dire need of a wipedown. You’ve half a mind to take some disinfectant to it with latex gloves and a cotton swab. It hums and sighs, the power light pulsating slowly, indicating dormancy. You open it, fingers typing Dave’s password without your help.

The screen pauses, almost thoughtfully, then shakes the text box clean.

You got it wrong.

After several bad guesses and a whole lot of cursing, it occurs to you that perhaps his password is the same as it always was, you just _typed it wrong_. Growling under your breath, you move slowly this time, meticulously hunting out each key and pecking it carefully. 

You are admitted.

Dave is lazy, or just forgetful; he leaves all his windows open, tabs by the handful, disorganized. He still has all his own blogs bookmarked – even the ones he stopped maintaining back in junior high. Sometimes you do look at those, to reminisce. There was a time, you often lament, when Dave was your little man – never more and never less. You spoiled him with candy, rather than kisses; he played with his toys, not yours; you told him bedtime stories, instead of filthy promises best saved for a _Penthouse_ Letter...

At Dave’s graduation from eighth grade, he got testy and red in the face every time you tried to take a picture of him, had insisted on taking pictures of you, instead. Then, and for several years after the fact, you’d dismissed it as exemplary teenage fussiness. Now, your memory is colored with the bittersweet truth: your arm around Dave’s shoulder, your hands coming in contact with his, your fingers innocently ruffling his hair... You know how he must’ve felt that night, why he insisted on stuffing his face with a celebratory Big Mac instead of stuffing his ego with your congratulations. 

From this vantage point, Dave’s entire transition into pubescence is marked by a gradual descent into the maddening landslide of his crush on you. A crush that, rather than stomping out – you didn’t really try, not with any conviction – you fanned into a violent inferno. A crush revolved not around you, even, but Dave’s glorified, imprecise, half-constructed relief of you.

And now, for the first time, it seems he has discovered that if he peels back the gold leaf, there is only cold, tarnished copper. 

In your travels, you stumble into one of Dave’s unfinished comics. It’s the usual asinine gimmicks – just foul enough to pander to the assholes who love Ashton Kutcher unironically, just clever enough to slip by the parameters of rejection in smarter circles. _Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff_ is, by your estimation, Dave’s farthest-reaching venture, with a frighteningly indefinite shelf-life. This prospective installment, at a glance, amounts to little more than a few poignant piss jokes and a precisely executed punchline. All in bad taste, naturally.

It’s a truly gross illustration of the word ‘juxtaposition’ in its most literal sense.

Also, you can’t help but notice, it’s you and Dave. Well, figuratively, anyway. It’s still Sweet Bro, still Hella Jeff, but the situation Dave has painted his characters into bears an uncanny resemblance to a painfully embarrassing scene you found yourself in just a couple of weeks ago. And though the mere memory of it burns the corners of your eyes with furious tears, in the context of this absurd piece of shit, it’s _actually pretty funny_.

You’re not above laughing at your own expense, but you draw the line at several thousand other strangers laughing, too.

You shut the laptop, none too gently, and retreat into the bedroom. 

When Dave comes home, he’s on his phone, yammering away at his agent – who took him on as a bit of a charity case, you suspect. He’s irate, dumping fancy, embossed paper bags onto the counter. He stopped at your favorite restaurant, called ahead to have everything prepared.

You know for a fact that he doesn’t have your credit card on him.

“That sophomoric _garbage_?” he snaps into the phone. 

You make no effort to eavesdrop discreetly, instead planting yourself in the chair right next to him, digging into dinner. 

“It’s a hobby, not a fucking livelihood! It was going to go on hiatus the minute a book sold!” His voice is climbing higher and higher in volume and pitch, incensed as he is. He’s cute when he’s agitated, his hair windswept, his face and neck blotched scarlet.

You try not to think about it too hard, what with your inability to get too hard.

Though your curiosity is as voracious as your empty stomach, you aren’t nearly brain damaged enough to inquire about the phone call, once it’s over. Rather, you’ll let Dave come to you, and he inevitably will.

Licking the sweet, tangy Buffalo sauce from your fingers, though, you do ask, “What’s up?” 

Hunched in his seat, hands buried in his hair and looking for all the world like he’s just been sentenced to a shot of Potassium Chloride, he says, “I got an offer.”


	17. Armistice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> " _It's not a walk in the park to love each other._ "

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I tried, therefore no one should criticize me.

 Physical therapy is a lot like regular therapy, just with extraneous movement. This is the thought that sears itself across your brain as, for the last time, you squint up at the windows of the hospital’s north wing. Noontime sun reflects off them, blinding. 

The soft hiss of automated doors is a hushed, sorrowful greeting, and the rush of cold central air is a blessed relief. 

“Strider, PT at twelve-thirty,” you tell the receptionist curtly. She’s not your favorite, always staunch and willfully forgetful as if to spite you. You don’t even wait for her to confirm, just take a seat in one of the stiff chairs. Wearily, you eye one of the squashy couches, but you hate the way they swallow you whole. 

The ceilings are high and skylights allow natural light to flood the place, brightening the modest peach walls. The whole space is simultaneously abuzz with activity and yet still. Nurses and doctors and students pass in and out of focus while patients and their escorts wait around in the kind of commodified boredom that only exists in hospitals.

Jill comes to meet you in the waiting room, not sending a lackey in scrubs like the MD’s usually do. Jill is tall and dyes her hair blonde, and tans without the aid of accelerator. She’s toned and could kick your ass even on a good day.

You think she’s beautiful.

“How’s it goin?” she asks you, like she’s asked you nearly every Tuesday and Thursday for the last three years. 

“It’s goin,’” you drawl, smiling to signal that it’s going and it’s going _well_.

“Where’s your boy this week?”

“On a business trip.” 

“You must be pleased,” she says, not congratulatory, but open-ended. Her sculpted eyebrows act as makeshift question marks.

“I’m pleased for him.”

Dave’s career is a dark comedy unto itself, a pastiche in the extreme. You’re often inundated with his residual disenchantment. His jaded fatigue rivals your own, which, given the circumstances, is saying a mouthful. “He’s in LA, negotiating movie rights.”

“Movie rights,” Jill is impressed. “So, did you drive, today?”

“I walked.” 

“Didn’t feel up to it?”

You shrug. You feel fine. 

“Must be difficult, with your brother gone so often,” she prompts. 

She doesn’t know the half of it. For a moment, every two-bit tabloid you’ve ever laid eyes on flashes through your head: photos snapped of Dave with various women in a garish red Porsche;. Dave leaving West Coast nightclubs with Division Seven jetlag.

Of course, what you usually get treated to is Dave with a Pro-ball hangover and at least five new phone numbers in his contacts.

Jill takes you through the usual exercises, comments on your arm, your hand-eye coordination. When asked if you’ve been practicing, you simply say yes, you have, not specifying that the majority of that practice involves a three-hour block of time reserved expressly for video games. Where your eyes will probably fail, at least your motor skills will compensate. 

Forty-five minutes flies by, too quickly, yet not quickly enough. In the beginning, you’d resented this. You’d loathed the stale hospital air, the smell of latex and industrial floor wax. You didn’t even want to work out at home, since your failures had made you bitter. It isn’t until you’re signing some paperwork – you’ve always resented paperwork, who _doesn’t_ resent paperwork? – that you notice the date. This puts your last physical therapy appointment two weeks shy of the actual third year anniversary. Something about that puts you off, like a child not getting his way. 

It’s funny, knowing that some fifteen-hundred miles west, some two hours behind, Dave’s probably being photographed at this very moment...meanwhile, you’ve assimilated seamlessly into the surrounding crowd, peacefully anonymous.

You can’t say you envy him.

The sky has grown dark. The heat from the day has sunken into the pavement, hibernating, while the air is bloated with humidity. Thunder rolls in the distance, a low, baleful rumble. It won’t be long before sheets of rain will pummel the beaten concrete.

At home, you drop your keys in the dish by the door; kicking off your sneakers, you make your way through the kitchen, down the hall, into your bedroom. It feels like your bedroom: your belongings dominate the dresser, and the closet has thinned on Dave’s end. In the bathroom, a thin layer of dust has settled over his things on the counter. It used to bother you when he would pack toiletries; now, it bothers you that he never does.

The storm is in full swing, the thunder heralding not rain but hailstones the size of golf balls.

Dave’s flight departs in two hours; you probably won’t see him until late, though. You consider ordering the greasiest pizza in Houston, have it waiting for him when he gets here. You’ll think about it.

To kill time, you shower and brush your teeth. You even dry your hair, run some product through it. You leave your stubble, though – more a blond patch of sunshine than a five o’ clock shadow. There’s something inherently soothing about rubbing lotion into your skin – along your sore calves, behind the pits of your knees, fingertips massaging along the muscles in your thighs. You’re strong again, you can feel it in the tension in your abdomen, the sturdy tone of your arms.

Your fingers don’t slip anymore – at least, no more and no less than anyone else’s your age. You pull on some sweats and crawl into bed. Rather than reflect on the intense and conflicting emotions inspired by the end of your physical therapy, you decide to read a book.

It’s slow going. Your eyes get distracted and wander off the page or jump to words in other sentences, whole other paragraphs, sometimes. Your thoughts get jumbled, less and less about the ornery Sargeant and his company and more and more about Dave, coming home and slipping out of his suit and his persona and turning down the volume. Hollywood has made Dave loud, you think.

But the truth could be that he has always been loud; you just weren’t listening.

Thinking about Dave for too long has the effect it usually does; you’re getting harder and harder and at last, you have to put your book down because it’s too difficult to concentrate when your vision is blurring with want. You’ll have to start over from where you originally left off, but that’s alright, there are worse fates in this world. Wriggling halfway out of your pants, you think of Dave – not as he actually is, but as you remember him, ideally: affectionate and eager and thoroughly interested. You imagine him coming home to you, only to you, shutting off that goddamn phone, wrapping his arms around you, hands unable to settle…

At the exact moment that you get off, your phone buzzes loudly, inching across the endtable. 

You don’t answer in time, preoccupied with afterglow, but when the phone beeps with a voicemail, you muster the strength to reach over and check it out.

“Hey.” 

It’s Dave.

“Just wanted to let you know that, uh,” is that giggling in the background? “I won’t be making it back tonight.” He doesn’t even offer a transparent excuse, doesn’t sound remorseful in the least. “See ya’ soon.”

Your brain is confused, all doped up on oxytocin while sinking under the weight of disappointment. The emotional tug-of-war taxes you in tandem with your orgasm and you drift into discontented sleep, lulled by the percussion of hail on reinforced glass.

  
  


 

 

 

You’re sorely tempted to screen your calls purely because you can. This answering machine is an archaic, secondhand affair you rescued from Goodwill, but you consider it an addition to the family. It’s the small things, is the lesson you’ve learned from these three years raising Dave. 

Dave, at the moment, is running around your ankles, squealing, “Bo! Bo! Phone! Bo!”

You reach down and trap his head of downy blond hair between your gloved palm and your leg, laughing. “I know, lil’ man. The machine’ll get it, listen.”

Dave goes totally still, grabs hold of your leg to steady himself. He listens as intently as a toddler can, but isn’t hearing the words so much as the noise of the voice as it peels through the miniscule speaker, a little distorted.

“Hey Dirk! Long time no see! Call back one of these days so we can have a girl’s night out!” she’s yelling. “We miss you, buddy!”

You want to leap on that phone. Your greatest desire is to answer, tell Roxy how good it is to hear her voice, tell her you miss her and all your friends. Tell her yeah, you’ll come out tonight, meet up at the bar and knock a few back until someone ends up with hickeys or a black eye or both because that’s the only way to do it.

Dave, clinging to you, is an anchor, and instead of floating buoyantly on the night with your friends, you will sink under the surface with him.

Today was your only day off. It’s the first day off you’ve had in months that didn’t get commandeered by errands. This morning, you pulled Dave in his beat-up red wagon down the street to the convenience mart for frozen waffles and generic brand vanilla ice cream – he talked a mean game and managed to wrangle you into purchasing some sprinkles too. Sprinkles for breakfast, some parent you’re turning out to be. Then after breakfast, the two of you had a nap and when you woke up, he was out in the living room, glued to the television. He had popped a tape of _Sesame Street_ recordings in and was swaying a little, humming contentedly with Big Bird. You combed his hair for a bit and let him crawl on you like a jungle gym. 

“Bo?” His little speech impediment alerts you to the present. “Bo, you can go, if you want.” Dave is perceptive, more so than most people, let alone kids his own age. “I don’t mind! I can take care of myself!”

“Aw kid, no.” You hoist him up on your hip and carry him into the kitchen. “Know what I want?” _I want to go out drinking with my friends, Jesus Christ_. “I want you to help me make dinner tonight, okay? We’ve got stuff for tacos and I’m gonna’ need your mad skill with that cheese grater.”

“Aw yeah, tacos! Can we have melty shells tonight?” he’s already giddy at the prospect of some lean beef wrapped in a tortilla. You might as well take him all the way to Nirvana.

“Absolutely.” You set him down at the table and set up shop for him, a head of lettuce and a sizable chunk of cheddar for him to make a mess with. He gets right to work, leaving you with the hot stove and the sharp knives. 

“I want _spicy_ salsa, like you eat!” he insists from his seat.

“Sure thing, kiddo.” While he isn’t looking, you spoon some from the mild jar into a little monkey dish for him; he’s never noticed the difference. 

You also hope he won’t notice the difference tonight when you leave him to climb to the rooftop and take out your frustrations on thin air.

He will notice, though. Maybe not tonight, but on other nights, he will notice, and one night in particular, he will follow you up. He will hide in the shadows but he won’t fool you and you’ll invite him to watch you in earnest. And in the coming years, watching you in earnest will become swinging at you in earnest, and then one day – over a decade from this point in time – Dave will land his first blow to you, strike you hard across the shoulder with the flat of his blade. You’ll stumble, fall with shock, and Dave will drop his shitty sword to the concrete with a _clang_ and rush to you, mumbling about how sorry he is, he didn’t mean to hit so hard, didn’t think he’d hit at all –

And you’ll console him through your pain.

  
  


*       *       *

  
  


The idea came to you in a dream. You’re putting the finishing touches on the ‘invitation’ when your phone vibrates against your leg, a message from Dave. He just landed in IAH and will be home soon.

_Good_ , you think, placing the note neatly under the bow of the katana. It’s new, and sharp, and ready to see action. You took your time with the note, used your best penmanship with your right hand, just in case. It’s even nice stationery – fine, red rice paper that you will probably never use again. 

  
  


_Meet me on the roof_.

  
  


Just like old times.

Acquiring a key to the roof exit was a simple matter of charming the young lady at the front desk. Charming ladies of all ages has always been easy for you; charming men is easy enough too, though deciphering which ones will be receptive is often the trick. 

In the elevator, you ponder the ways in which proposing a strife is very much an act of courtship: the fastidious attention to detail, the equivocal solicitation, fashioned more as a summons than an allurement. The fluttery pressure in your chest seems to resonate in time with your footsteps through the top hall. While the rest of the building is all luxe marble and plush carpeting and polished oak, the top floor is bare and eerily impersonal, a stretched length of white drywall and linoleum. Shifting the mechanism in the lock feels big and important, and as you shoulder the heavy door open, you imagine yourself an oversimplified Sisyphus. 

The sun is glaring off of the concrete, even through your shades. You watch, hand shielding your eyes from the worst of the sun, as three airplanes – miniscule, aluminum birds – intersect flight paths. From the ground, they all look as though they’ll inevitably crash into one another, but no such disaster transpires and all is well in the world. 

You have time before Dave arrives. You warm up. The grip feels familiar, but strange too, like coming home to your parents’ house after years of estrangement.

Not that you’d know.

The wait spans an age of compressed infinities, point-zero-two’s and point-eleventy-sevens and so on until the sun has moved through the sky. You realize, belatedly, that you are _nervous_ , second-guessing this whole affair. What if he decides not to show? What if you just wait up here until sundown? What if he just wants to make you wait? What if you give in and then meet him awkwardly in the elevator? Then who’s rejecting whom?

_Rejecting_? Wait a second –

The door opens, industrial hinges wailing as Dave emerges in the light, the sword tucked loosely in his grasp. He deftly plucks a smoldering cigarette out of his mouth, rolls it between his thumb and forefinger a moment before flicking it onto the concrete and toeing it out.

“Seriously?” he asks. 

“Why not?” you counter. Questions answered with questions answered with questions until the entire conversation regresses into a loop of gnarled, neurotic confusion could probably describe a decent chunk of your interactions with Dave in the years since your hospitalization. 

Instead of satisfying the convention, Dave confronts you. “Your dominant arm is compromised. Your dexterity is shit. Sometimes, when you read, I catch you going back three, even four times.”

You shrug. “Show’s how much you know.” _Maybe if you were home more often_ , you think venomously, _you’d see that_. 

“This is bullshit,” Dave points out.

“Maybe,” you allow, “but you showed. And you came prepared.”

Dave lets out a weary little sigh, props the sheathed sword against a wall. Carefully, he undoes the brass buttons on his two-thousand dollar suit jacket, shrugs it off and folds it in half, then in neat quarters. At two grand, it’d better not wrinkle. He rolls his shoulders under the restrictive fabric of his pressed button-down, cracks his neck and his knuckles. It’s the whisper of his leather belt as it glides out from around his hips that really turns you on.

Wrapping his fingers around the grip, he gets into stance, waits for you to do the same, waits to see who will draw first and by how many fractions of a millisecond.

You are so high up. That is the first thought that sluices through your head as the dance begins. It is a thought you ought to have had coming up here, but it reserved the right to be had until the very last, most inopportune moment. This isn’t your shitty eight-floor walkup. This is a goddamn high rise. What in God’s good name were you thinking?

Dave seems unconcerned. His movement is lithe and precise, as if pulled by strings. You gauge his strength not in the weight of his blows, but in his restraint. But he isn’t fighting with his all, merely reciting a somatic chorus, aiming only at the opposing blade.

You take a stab at him, literally. The tip of your sword catches on the delicate material of his shirt and it shreds, the ripping of a thousand threads simultaneously the most gratifying and awful noise you’ve heard in a long time. The two of you pause, eying the damage.

Dave is fine, if not incensed.

“You jackass,” he mutters. “This shirt was expensive.”

“ _C’est la vie_ ,” you declare before flashstepping behind him and wounding the shirt anew.

“ _Fuck_!”

Having sufficiently provoked him, you ready yourself for his best. And he doesn’t disappoint. In his next series of attacks, it is as if he has poured every ounce of his anger and frustration with you into his movement, for the shirt, for years past, for playing God, for ever trying to deny him, for leaving him alone… Dave has a talent for bearing grudges. 

When his blade slices through the skin of your left arm, he wavers, which was the wrong thing to do. It stings, but it’s superficial, and you work through the pain and catch him on the side – again, tearing the silk of his shirt, rather than his skin. 

“Augh!”

With steps too quick to see, you disorient him, get him dizzy until he’s lost his balance and falls to the ground, and you trap his neck beneath the blunt side of your sword. 

His chest is heaving and you can feel his rib cage expand and contract between your thighs; his shades have been knocked aside, and he’s glaring at you, his anger diminished by the harsh sunlight. 

Dave lets his head roll back onto the concrete, still breathing through his mouth. “Alright,” he murmurs, “you win.”

Standing up, you offer him your hand. The cut on your arm has already stopped bleeding. 

In the elevator, he removes his shirt and holds it up and sighs. His skin is soused with sweat, and his pants cling to him even without the belt. 

“I can repair it.”

He eyes you dubiously. “It’s fine silk.”

“I have the needles,” you reassure him, “and the dexterity.” When he still looks skeptical, you remind him of how the shirt came to be in tatters in the first place.

He hands it to you with a grumble as the elevator doors slide open.

On the bathroom counter, there is a spare razor that doesn’t belong to you. You briefly consider using it out of spite. But instead, you get in the shower without making trouble. The lukewarm water bites for a moment as it trickles down your injured arm, but soon the pain recedes into nonexistence. Still, to be safe, you’ll apply some neosporin later.

You use Dave’s shampoo to wash your hair, and the smell as the suds wash down your body splices your thoughts: Dave as he was on the roof, then shirtless in the elevator, the elegant cut of his hips, the tangy scent of sweat on his skin, presumably then, the smell of soap while he rinses off…

You’re in the middle of a nicely-constructed fantasy when the bathroom door opens, Dave walks in, mid-sentence and then slams the door shut again. There’s a lengthy silence while your hand remains still, uncertain around your cock – still hard, distractingly so. Then, the door opens again, gingerly this time. Through the glass, you can see Dave poking his head in. 

“Are you – ?”

“I wasn’t even close, but yeah, I am trying to get off.” Your voice is thick and your cock feels heavy, so without obliging Dave and his apparently sensitive constitution, you start pumping again, though with more intent than before. 

Dave doesn’t leave the bathroom. He comes in, stands awkwardly by the sink, eyes averted at the floor. “So…” he falters. “So, you’re hard?”

“Painfully so.” Your attempt at nonchalance goes right down the drain with the soap. 

“Can I…?”

With a monumental sigh, you open the shower door and look Dave in the face. He’s a grown man – eye level with you, with a sharp haircut and a slim figure and high cheekbones but the uncertainty in his face reminds you of the sixteen-year-old Daddy’s Boy who thought he was seducing you. His eyes roam over you, following a drop of water until he’s examining the seam between leg and torso and then

“Oh.” 

You are helpless to stop the chuckle that bubbles up from your throat. “Come on in, then.”

Dave strips frantically, feet getting stuck in his slacks so that he has to hop out of them. He peels off his socks, his snug-fitting underwear and hurries in behind you. He just stares, no longer assessing you so much as the boundaries he hadn’t thought to ask about. 

Snaking your arms around his trim waist, clasping your fingers behind his back, you pull him close, disparate bodies aligned. He gasps when you nuzzle his ear, kiss him there, whisper, “I’ve missed you.” 

He’s a grown man who wears expensive suits and who likes to act as though he is burdened with glorious indifference but he is also still Dave who moans when you caress his back, fingers scraping over angular shoulder blades, hands palming his ass. 

You back him into a corner and kiss him on the mouth.

His kisses are covetous, clumsy, as though he were famished from inattention. You both know the opposite holds true. He isn’t slow or sensual, but carnal, as if he might devour you. Not that you wouldn’t let him. His arms are wrapped around your neck and his nails are keen against your skin.

Biting his lower lip, you suck it into your mouth for a second. “Easy,” you roll your hips against his, and he whines. He tastes like tobacco and whatever alcohol he was drinking on his flight.

“God, how long have you been able to…”

“About a year,” you murmur into his neck.

“And you never _told me_?” he sounds scandalized.

“It isn’t like you were still trying.”

He’s hurt by that but rather than hurt you back and ruin this improbable reunion, he leverages himself so that he can maneuver you under the spigot. He pushes his fingers through your hair, washing away the suds. He kisses your forehead, your nose, presses his lips to yours and tries for a softer approach this time. His tongue moves sweetly and your lips part and he hums in your mouth, pleased.

You’re enjoying his body, feeling the tension in his muscles, but he’s even less patient than you are. His fingers seize your wrist and he moves you so that he can grind against your palm. You rearrange yourself so that you can grab your cock in the same hand, move against one another. Dave stops kissing, hangs his head, water dripping through his hair, down his face, into his open mouth.

“D-Dirk,” he pants.

You kiss his face.

He sneaks his hands around you, grabs your ass and squeezes, pushes you arhythmically against him. You let him finger you because you’ve missed him and you love him and you want him, and you almost can’t believe this is happening. He’s stroking gently, pressing two of his fingertips forward, sucking on the skin beneath your ear when he says, “I want to fuck you.”

“Yes, please.”

“But not in here.”

You wrench the water off and step out of the shower, not bothering to dry off. You lead Dave by the hand into the bedroom, then locate a condom and some lube and press them into his hand. He looks dutifully guilty about the condom, which breaks your heart as much as it makes you smug. 

“How do you want me?” you ask him, sitting on the edge of the bed, pumping him, teasing him. 

“Um.” He starts to rip open the foil. “On all fours.” His voice is quiet and small.

You moan, dragging a pillow down to rest your head on. He preps you a little extra, taking more time than either of you really needs, his fingers slip-sliding in and out of you with ease. You can hear him sighing while he applies lube to himself, hear the reticent scrunch of his palm around the latex. 

He soothes a hand over your back while entering you, fingers pressed against your vertebrae. He doesn’t go in all the way, just a few inches or so, before pulling his hips back and thrusting forward. Over the last few months, you’ve been making do, but it feels better having him inside you as opposed to silicone. The hand on your back migrates to your belly; he employs pressure against your navel as he starts to go deeper, and you savor the feeling of fullness. 

He nudges you forward so that he can kneel behind you on the bed, grabs onto one of your hips and takes advantage. Elated, you notice that he’s picking up momentum. You’re spouting half-nonsense into your pillow, singing his praises: you love him, his dick feels so so good, you love the way he fucks you, et cetera. And he must be eating it up because his hips slam into you faster.

This is going to be short and sweet, but you don’t need anything else. You just want him.

He spreads you open while he fucks you, makes a string of throaty, lewd observations about the view while you push back on him. He smacks your ass once, twice before reaching around and squeezing your dick, trying to stroke it, but his timing’s all off.

He cums first, staggering against you, making more noise than is probably safe. But he stays hard for a while afterward. He pulls out, rolls you onto your back and pushes himself back in without any resistance and keeps fucking you, his cock rubbing in all the right places. He plays with your balls and massages your taint and the pressure becomes tenfold and you’re cumming harder than you have in weeks. He grabs your dick and pumps you through orgasm, protracting it, and his voice gets caught up with yours, all adoration but no sense at all. Then he bows between your legs and sucks you clean, keeps sucking until you can’t take it anymore and have to push him away.

For a long time, the only sound is the two of you catching your breath. You lie side by side, Dave with his hand splayed on your belly, apparently unfazed by the rapidly cooling semen on his fingers. He does, eventually, wipe his hand on the sheets, then wipes you down, and even sits up to remove the condom. 

You wince as it hits the trash.

He returns to your side and kisses your cheek before reclining on his back, arms folded under his head. The air is stiff, and despite the surge of relief that has filled you, you can tell that – pardon the phrase – something is up.

Finally, Dave speaks.

“I got a place.”

It hurts, and you aren’t sure if it would hurt more or less if you were surprised. “I figured.”

“You should come out there.”

“To Los Angeles,” you confirm.

“Yeah.”

You exhale, long and hard through your nose. Looking around, this place doesn’t look like home to you, anymore – it hasn’t for a while. It looks more like an abandoned house, with one lonely resident trying to force it into submission. As a kid, all you’d ever dreamed of was getting the hell out of Texas and then Dave came along and shot that dream through like Swiss cheese and now, twenty-six years later, it is Dave who is reopening the avenue. 

You turn on your side and put your head on his chest. “Delete their numbers.”

His heartbeat speeds up and it makes your eyes burn with tears.

“Delete them and I’ll come with you.”

Dave smooths his fingers through your hair. “Yeah. Okay.” It isn’t an apology, exactly, and it isn’t a picturesque reconciliation.

But it’s a start.


	18. Disclosure

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The problem with incest is not that it's incest, but that it skews relationships from every possible angle.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title originally had cleverly placed parentheses because apparently I think I'm Fall Out Boy.

 You can't, with certainty, remember how John, Jade, and Rose came into Dave's life. You don't even really know if Dave ever specified the conditions of the event. Indeed it occurs to you that you never asked, not for the details, anyway. But in only a few years – short, to a man your age, merely a patchwork of days and weeks in quick succession – they have become regular fixtures of your household.

Dave is carrying John with him into your tiny eat-in kitchen, a round, acne-scarred face pixelating on the screen. He's a cute kid, but while all parents are predisposed to the assumption that their children will grow up to be comely, you're not a real parent; just a brother, pretending. John will probably grow up okay-enough, and Dave is nearing the end of an agonizing journey through orthodontic hell. They're fourteen, both scrawny and stringy, though Dave has developed a lean density while John – haunted by the omnipresence of sweets in all their permutations – is that bizarre hybrid of compact chub. Sometimes, you overhear Dave telling John he'll outgrow it. Sometimes, you think about telling them both that it's okay if he doesn't.

You care about these kids you barely know. You've seen their faces, made eye contact from thousands of miles apart. You've eavesdropped on their struggles and triumphs, covertly chuckled at their stupid jokes, briefly fretted over their moral dilemmas. They aren't your kids, but they are friends of your kid, and that has to count for something.

“Dave, I don't think you know what 'reductive' even means,” John's voice accuses, condensed and a little distorted.

“Alright, nutty professor, so correct me, take me to school.”

“I don't know what it means either, but I'm pretty sure it's not that.”

You don't require context to firmly side with John.

You have some friends – older, real parent friends – who have suggested that you ought to be concerned about Dave's reliance upon long-distance friendships. A decade ago, you would have loudly, rudely rejected these suggestions. And now, you still reject them, but privately, nodding your head and thanking your friends for their input, silently willing them to shove it. That's what being a grownup is all about, you've realized: knowing when to tell people to fuck off, and knowing when to think it derisively.

Eventually, Dave finishes his circular wandering by huddling on the opposite end of the futon, his cold toes sporadically pressing against your leg. He has his laptop open still, the little fan whirring incessantly, and you turn up the volume on the television.

Dave's face is different now, bare, not contorted into a mask of tenacity. He lifts his shades and rubs at his eyes, which with the onset of adolescence have developed chronic dark circles. You're not looking forward to seeing the effect high school is going to have.

“Homework?” you inquire casually.

“Working on it.”

Easily, you could remind him that if he didn't wait six hours after coming home to start, he might get to sleep at a reasonable hour. But you remember just what a mountain of fermented bullshit that argument is, because you remember being fourteen and suddenly it was like somebody grabbed you and wound your internal clock about four hours backward.

Still, you wish he would make things easier on himself.

He pushes his shades onto his head and growls, his typing becoming hard and angry. “This is such horseshit,” he grumbles.

“Mhm,” you agree.

He looks so aggravated and the tension that oozes out of him is contagious.

“Just a few more months,” you offer. You'd like to make this summer a good one for him, whatever that entails. Sometimes, like when you're falling asleep or just going about the necessary minutiae of life, you like to imagine flying his friends out here for a visit, all at once, the four of them in real time.

 

 

 

 

 

Los Angeles is an alien landscape; a living, breathing juxtaposition, like filthy grit lodged under a polished fingernail. The traffic is miserable, as usual, and you have come to understand the popularity of the luxury SUV. You should've gone with Dave, because even though you'd probably still be late, at least the AC wouldn't be dodgy.

During a lull, you call him. “Hey, sorry, I'm stuck in traffic.”

“It's cool.” You can hear the sound of silverware clinking in the background. “John's late, too.”

“Alright, see you in twenty.”

“Take the exit out to the Heights and make it fifteen.”

Traffic has started to pick up. “Love you, too, Dave.” You laugh when he makes an uncomfortable noise, knowing that he's sitting next to Rose.

When you do finally make it to the restaurant, John is still late. You shake Rose's delicate hand and ruffle Dave's hair. The weather is picturesque: bright and beautiful, an endless blue sky, hemmed only by the tender foliage of the trees strategically planted on the sidewalk. But the trees are small and look fake.

“Rose, how goes the book?”

“Slowly, but well.”

“Better to take time and craft a work of art than to crank out a prolific heap of trash,” you jab Dave with your elbow.

“Tell that to my looming deadline,” she smirks.

“Tell that to my Escalade that you hijack at every opportunity,” Dave adds.

“Yeah, yeah. Rose,” you raise your glass of water, the wedges of lemon fished out and cast aside, “here's to your magnum opus: may you never request an extension.”

“And may I be so lucky as to have Dave produce a terrible live action parody.”

“Live action in 2-D. Cheers.”

Your glasses clink in the middle of the table and then Dave takes custody of your discarded lemons.

“How's the industry of florid plush, these days?” Rose asks. She's politely nibbling on her appetizer.

Before you can get a word in, Dave takes the liberty for himself. “Oh, Dirk's moved on to bigger things,” he grins. “Not that you needed to,” he eyes you out of the corner of his shades.

“I'm not going to live off of my baby brother.” _I'm not going to live off of my boyfriend, either_.

“Why not? I did it for twenty-three years.”

“That's not how it works, kid.”

“Would anyone care to enlighten me about these bigger things?” Rose asks, a bit snappish.

“He's producing,” Dave says smugly, “music.”

Rose looks bemused.

“It seemed like the next logical conclusion,” you offer, when really, being out here made it difficult to do much of anything else. If you wanted to pull your own weight – and you really, really did – you had to find a bigger, more lucrative source of income. “Mostly for film.”

“He started with mine.” Dave is grinning, but you really wish he would shut up.

“I think that's brilliant,” Rose smiles. “A more copacetic application of your talents.”

You shrug. “I suppose.”

At that moment, someone comes bustling through the crowded patio and drops himself into the chair between Rose and Dave. His hair is dark and at one time, might have been neatly combed; he is waring tailored, blue slacks and a crisp Oxford shirt, but you can tell from here that his belt isn't real leather. He adjusts his slim, black glasses and then you realize –

“Sorry I'm so late, guys!”

“It's quite alright John,” Rose assures him. “Though I must say that half an hour does strain the limits of 'fashionable.'”

John looks around and counts, sees that all the seats are taken. “I thought Jade was meeting us?” he asks.

“Nah, her conference doesn't get done until like, six, but she promised to meet us for drinks.”

You know Dave is excited about it, in spite of his composure. _Friends for fifteen years and they've hardly been in the same room_. It baffles you, and you wonder if you could have sustained such an intangible friendship.

The four of you eat lunch together: exquisite pastas with sauces like gossamer and bite-sized portions of steak wrapped in organic bacon and arrangements of grilled swordfish over a bed of greens, glazed with vinaigrette. Personally, you stay well away from the wine. Tonight, on the way home, you intend to seek out the greasiest burger possible.

You let Dave brag about your shiny new career as he pleases, and whine about his artistic woes. John, apparently, let his comedy shtick backslide, let it pay his student debt while he majored in business ethics and went on to find success managing a corporate division of the family business. When Dave seriously asks John if he's happy, he shrugs and says “I'm lucky; I have a salary. I have insurance. I get paid vacation time. And I'm just starting out.”

“Yeah, man, but are you happy?” Dave looks genuinely skeptical.

John thinks about this, for a solid thirty seconds. In the end, he nods. “I am happy,” he decides.

Dave – college dropout, commercially successful, celebrity Dave – looks on in disbelief. “Fucking incredible.”

When talk turns to heading out for some pregame shots, you politely bow out. You excuse yourself with work you don't have, with sleep you don't need, because you honestly think the four of them need time to themselves. You'll drop in later to say hello to Jade, in the flesh, but let them have their reunion of four.

On the drive home, you feel disconnected from the world, and it isn't this surreal city as it swallows you whole. Dave should be here, and you should not. Dave should be meeting his friends without any lingering detritus of childhood. You imagine, in some parallel universe, that you would receive a call in Texas, that Dave would tell you about his night, about finding time for friends, about kissing Jade Harley, and that you would congratulate him softly.

It's around ten-thirty when the door is drunkenly jimmied open. You're in bed, book open in your lap, scanning the same paragraph for twenty minutes, uninvested. It's a good book, both antagonist and protagonist developed in equal measure, and a plot constructed from several clever, interlocking subplots that tie nicely, surprisingly together. It's a good, good book, but you aren't reading it so much as in pursuit of white noise, or at least something tantamount.

Dave is in the middle of some raucous retelling of Hollywood shenanigans, hyperbolic in the extreme, and Rose is laughing in a most undignified half-snort. There is also a trilling, _allegrissimo_ string of giggles that clearly belongs to Jade. Your only consolation is the sober and accommodating chuckle in John's gentle tenor, and you safely assume he was their designated.

You said you would say hello. And you do wish to meet Jade, for real. But it's...well, at the risk of sounding your age, it's late, and you are tired. But a quick hello won't send you to an early grave. You pull on some jeans and meander into the hall, watching as Dave produces out a bottle of Gallo you may or may not have been holding onto.

“Well, now I feel under-dressed,” you offer by way of greeting, and four gazes fall on you, ranging from startled to congenial. Dave looks at you, simmering behind a thin shield of mirrored plastic.

“Not nearly enough,” Rose volleys, pink in the cheeks.

“I thought I'd venture out here to offer my company but if I'm only going to be objectified,” you smirk, “I'll just go back to bed.”

“Oh, but Bro,” Jade says, eyes bright and a little watery, “we can't help it; it's so obvious that good looks run in the family.” She is joking, and casual banter became a thing the two of you did a long time ago – so long ago that it predates your incestuous romance – but it feels different, in person. It feels like she is a stranger in your living room, drinking your wine and making flippant observations about your appearance, coming on to you and your brother in the same breath.

Everyone else in the room is too greased up with liquor to notice, but there is a grating tension in the air, and it demands recognition from the singular, totally sober occupant. You hold out for one glass of wine in the hopes that you too will lose touch with reality, will soften under the same sweet kiss as the rest of them. But you've never been a lightweight and Zin is pretty inefficient in that respect besides. After some idle conversation and a handful of lewd jokes, you excuse yourself back to bed.

You're midway through a paragraph in your book – actually reading, this time – when a noise pulls you out of focus: it's the intent click of high heels against the cherry floor. A quick glance over your book and under the door reveals a pair of red pumps. They pause, turning in a slow circle, before walking their owner into the bathroom across the way.

Most of the din has died down by midnight. Your unfinished glass of wine remains on your bedside table, mostly untouched. Switching off the light, you roll over. But in spite of the relative quiet, you lie awake on your side, staring at nothing, long enough to overhear a conversation not meant for you.

Two sets of footsteps halt at the end of the hall now – right outside your bedroom door.

“What's up?”

“Dave.” It's Jade.

Jade is the owner of the red pumps. Maybe it was for her physics conference, or maybe she always dresses nicely, but she had sat on your couch in her charcoal menswear, in those red pumps, with her hair released from its severe ponytail, tumbled over her shoulders. And now, she's standing outside in your darkened hall, with Dave.

“There's only one bedroom,” It's a sad observation, resigned, even.

“There's three.”

“That other one's not even lived-in; a guest room. And one is your office. And then, there's this.” You half expect her to knock softly on your door. “Dave.”

“Would a floor plan satisfy you?” he asks sarcastically.

“You know I'm not talking technicalities!” she hisses. “Tell me you're not still –”

“Don't. Please, don't.” Dave isn't whispering. Suddenly, you're starting to get the picture. “I'm happy,” he mutters after a tense pause.

Her silence is steel but her resolve crumbles into a sigh. “Is it me you're trying to convince?”

You listen to the ensuing events with a tightness coiled behind your sternum. There are cheery goodbyes and apologies for Jade's abrupt departure, and in the mix of farewells, you hear Dave offer to send her off with another bottle of wine – a parting gift, a peace offering, perhaps. She declines, on the grounds that getting it through airport security will be hell, which for all intents and purposes, is true.

You're still awake when the house has emptied and darkened, curled up on your side. You're awake, but pretending not to be when Dave comes to bed. He's fooled, at least for the time being, as he mindfully closes the bedroom door, and all you can hear is the rustle of expensive fabric as he undoes his pants and shirt. One of his knees cracks loudly and he curses under his breath.

The memory-foam mattress is silent and does not dip as Dave gets into bed with you, and you feel deprived of something impalpable and unimaginable, whatever it may be. You turn to look at him, and you wonder if he sees you, if he notices that you are awake.

It's almost two am.

Dave is on his back, arms folded under his head. All you can see of him is his profile, illuminated in silhouette: his straightforward, unbroken nose; the squareness of his jaw filed down to a graceful chin; an expressive neck on sturdy shoulders; light from the windows spills over his chest, which is stubbly.

You inch closer and stroke his stomach with a hand; underneath a meager softness, there is hard muscle, in need of a little definition. “I love you.”

He hums affectionately, sighs through his perfect nose. “Love you, too, Dirk.” He pets your dirty hair. “Night.”

“Night.”

Sleep creeps up on you in stagnant advances, like an ocean tide. And as you are swept out, you're buoyed by a sense of _saudade_ but ever threatened by the anchor of nostalgia tied to you. Your last coherent thought before sleep takes you is that perhaps after tonight, Dave really has left the remnants of his childhood in Texas.


	19. Popular Belief

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's complicated.

 Dave's not home when you get home.

You tried to do the chateau-for-two thing in the Hollywood Hills for a while there, but as it happens, gated communities can only do so much about the apparent paparazzi infestation. You'll never forget trying to shield the phone receiver from Dave's death threats echoing around the back yard as you reported the interloper to LA County's finest. As it happens, the two of you are better suited to smallish apartments. And, taking up an entire shelf in your refrigerator, there is a veritable buffet of takeout. Some things just never change.

Plopping onto the couch and putting on a movie, you're certain you know where Dave is – the same place his mind has been near constantly. You suppose you can't blame him: film premiers are serious business for him, the featured film's stupidity notwithstanding.

You're fighting a serious snooze through the climactic reveal when the door bursts open dramatically. Dave groans, shrugging off his blazer. It's nice, charcoal, antipodal of the suit he's picked out for the premier – screaming chartreuse, with the kind of vibrancy to make your eyes bleed. You take offense to it every time you open your closet.

“Rough day?” you ask, mechanical, eyes fixated on the over-budgeted explosions; they could've done with a little less primer cord.

“Yeah. Not really.” Dave can never make up his mind. You got used to that a long, long time ago. He squirms at your side, can't seem to get comfortable until the points of him – elbows and knees and toes – are digging into you. He rests his head on your shoulder. “I want to do something meaningful with my life,” he announces.

“Look around,” you offer, deadpan.

“ _Ha_.” Dave sulks, sinking against you. “The apartment? The nice furniture? The nicer clothes? The cars? Yeah alright, except I bought it all with money I made from manufacturing and distributing unrefined garbage.”

Dave is entering the obligatory existential crisis phase of life, the same battle you struggled quietly through while Dave's biggest worry was a D on his report card. “You have got to stop investing your worth as a human being in your parasocial economy. Your financial and cultural wealth is all well and good, and you should be proud of yourself, but if you're looking for significance, shut the fuck up and have a beer with me.”

Dave snuggles closer. “Okay.”

You crack the second bottle open – meant for you, but who's counting? – and hand it to him. It's a little warm, but Dave isn't so picky. “Seriously though, what do you mean by 'meaningful'?”

Guzzling down a fourth of his beer, he starts to peel the label. “I want to write something good.”

“Because a stingingly clever, politically savvy franchise of satire whose guise also serves as its source of parody couldn't possibly be good in any context, could it.”

“That is not what I mean, and also, you're too, too kind to it.”

“What's the issue here? Please can we skip the asinine formalities and get to the part where you blurt out an incoherent string of woes so that I can soothe you with an appropriate method?”

“I don't think anything you could do to soothe me could be called appropriate.”

“I'm really not in the mood.”

Dave growls and sits up, leans into the opposite end of the couch. “I want to write something that knows it's good.”

“No, you want to write something that _other people_ know is good,” you correct.

“Yeah, so what if I do? I've made my mark but it's like I tracked mud and dog shit all over Hollywood's clean carpet.” He sags into the arm rest, rolling shreds of wet paper between his palms. “Maybe I'm tired of being the butt of my own joke, sue me.”

You think about this, and about the reviews Dave's movies have amassed over the years – everything from glittering to scathing to just plain befuddled. Self-involved as he is, he's never even glanced at the online conversation, the level of which is almost always surprisingly clever. He hasn't read the nitpicking essays and the deconstructive theses. Or if he has, and he isn't convinced, then he's just being obstinate.

“Remember that time when you were in second grade, and you broke that kid's nose and I had to come answer for you?”

Dave laughs, nearly spitting out his drink. “Wow, I haven't thought about that in ages. Why, what's that got to do with anything?”

“Do you remember why you hit him?”

“Yeah, he was being a shit.”

“More specific,” you shove him with your foot.

Dave has to pause for thought now; he's the type of person who remembers the shape of every slight, but almost never the slight itself, and that scares you. Eventually, his face coils into a sour expression and you can see him remembering. “He was talking shit about you.”

“Not really,” you counter. “What was the offending accusation? Oh right, he told you he thought I was 'really fricking weird.' Which, let's be honest, that was a good call.”

“Maybe,” Dave admits.

You remember it vividly: Dave, pouting and antsy, fidgeting in a chair in the principal's office. The call had startled you: Dave had never gotten into a fight before – not that you knew of, anyway – and he'd done some real damage. What was worse, some immature part of you had been a teensy bit proud of him. You'd shushed him and the two of you faced the stoic wrath of his principal together. Dave looked bored, mostly, but for you, it was twenty minutes of post-trauma hell. The way this man phrased himself, the way he'd buried angry scorn beneath sober disappointment – even the way he'd gesticulated – had reminded you very much of your father.

Dave had been excused from the rest of the day, and you'd already told him that he'd spend his weekend working on an apology letter. You were fortunate that the family didn't want any other kind of recompense.

On the walk home, you'd asked him why, really, he'd done it.

'He called you weird, Bro.' You remember Dave with his small voice, dejected. You remember him hanging his head, mop of bright hair obscuring wet eyes. 'Said you weren't a real parent.'

The pain still hits you hard, so many years later. But you'd swallowed it then as you do now. You'd resisted the urge to indulge your cynicism and instead, you took Dave by the hand and imparted the only wisdom you had at twenty-five.

“Anyway,” you say, slithering across the couch and tucking yourself under Dave's arm, “what did I tell you that day?”

Dave's eyes light up and you wonder that he held onto that all this time. “You told me not to give a shit what other people think. And then you told me not to swear outside the house,” he grins. But it softens and fades and gives way to a tired scowl. He's already getting crow's feet. “I don't give a shit what anyone else thinks of what I've made.”

“No?”

“I give a shit what _I_ think I've made.”

He has you there. For several quiet moments, you bask in one another's company. He's warm and the steady rise and fall of his chest under you almost puts you to sleep.

“Dirk.” He jostles you awake.

“What?”

“I've been thinking –”

“Oh, is that what that smell is?”

He smacks you on the stomach and you laugh. His sleeves are rolled up to his elbows and you admire his forearms; it's a funny thing, to be so enamored with every single part of a person.

“I've been thinking of ending the franchise.” He declares this not with solemnity, but with the ease of flicking a cigarette. “I haven't told anyone, but I've been thinking of doing it, and if I do, I've been thinking of announcing it at the premier.”

You suck on the inside of your cheek until it hurts. “Then what?”

“I don't know. Maybe take some time off.” He starts rubbing you where he hit you. “Maybe start brainstorming a new script, or even a book, like I'd originally wanted.”

“You could go back to your novel,” you suggest, thinking of the typewriter that's gathered dust in his den.

“I could.”

He starts to talk about it, speculating, out-loud note-taking. You listen until you drop off, eyes sliding shut, and you fall asleep under his arm.

 

 

When you wake, you're slumped along the couch, your neck cramping without Dave to cushion it. Sitting up is a process of imperfect posture and protesting vertebrae and ornery joints: your muscles complain and conspire against you and you shoot up out of your seat when a grating pain cuts through your calve. You stand on it, applying pressure until it migrates into the arch of your foot before easing out of existence.

Your tired eyes find the clock above the stainless steel stove: you have to squint to make out the numbers. It's a little after six in the evening. You watch from a cerebral distance as tap water sloshes in your glass. Dave comes trudging down the hall, arms piled high with empty soda cans and stale beer bottles. Dumping them noisily into the recycling bin, he doesn't bother picking up the few that escaped.

“Did you work today?” he asks.

You nod, sipping on your water.

“Still up to dinner tonight, or...?” He nudges the stray cans into the space between bin and wall with his foot.

You'd forgotten, honestly. “Right. Yeah, I'm good for it.” You stretch and something cracks ominously. “Nothing fancy though, none of that shit.”

Dave grins. “I wouldn't dream of it.”

In spite of the promise of austerity, you wash your face and change into a clean shirt before heading out. It's nice to see Dave leave the apartment in jeans and a tee shirt, for once. In the bleached light of the elevator, you admire his hair, disheveled from where he undoubtedly had his hand buried, rubbing absently, scratching in creative distress. You sidle up close to him and kiss his temple, the urge too overwhelming to ignore.

He cringes like he would as a kid, when you'd send him off with a kiss and a hair-ruffle. Then the doors lumber open and you have to put space between you.

It's forty-seven degrees and you can't believe the trail of goosebumps that's creeping up your arms. Beside you, Dave wraps himself up in one of your plain sweatshirts. He doesn't drown in your clothes anymore – hasn't for such a long time, but he doesn't hole up in them as much, these days. Your footsteps echo off the pavement, bouncing from wall to concrete wall in the garage, and then suddenly it's as if someone put the world on 'mute' once the doors to Dave's car are shut.

You're pleased when Dave puts his blinker on a little before your favorite cheap burger joint; nothing fancy, indeed. Inside, none of the patrons appear to recognize Dave, or if they do, none of them care. It's a welcome change of pace. The woman who seats you looks to be in her forties, her red hair preserved in a stiff film of hairspray, her earrings too big not to be clip-on, and she still snaps her gum like a teenager,

She reminds you of someone, but you can't quite put your finger on it.

Dave orders a diet soda and you order your coffee, black, and Dave has to refrain from selecting a heap of appetizers – he allows you have the honor instead. Watching him stir sweetener into his root beer almost makes you gag.

“I thought about what you said earlier,” he mumbles. “The thing I _do_ kind of give a shit about is all this trashy tabloid nonsense about us that's been cropping up recently.”

You raise an eyebrow. “Recently? Or have you finally started wearing your glasses?”

“Shut up,” he kicks you fondly under the table.

From at least a year back, you can recall a slew of colorful headlines and incriminating insets about you and Dave, declaring Dave a terminal bachelor (true, in the most tragic sense), rendering your shared apartment as a kind of perpetual frat party of two. The accusations could be a lot worse – not to mention a lot more accurate – but as it stands, you're glad your parents aren't around to see or to make intrusive phone calls.

“I don't know man, if we're going to talk about criticism, you should probably be more worried about John and Rose.” Your heart sinks, so you take another heaping bite of your burger. “They've been getting...” you search for an inoffensive word, but Dave clears the matter up for you.

“Yeah, they're getting to be nosy as hell. It's awful.”

You nod. “You can't tell them – it's bad enough Jade knows.”

Dave groans and sinks into his seat. “Okay, I've told you a thousand times, she isn't going to say shit about it to anyone.”

“You haven't spoken in a while.”

“Yeah, she's probably drenched that bridge in kerosene and I'm the one who practically handed her the match, but that doesn't mean she's going to go blabbing.” He shovels an impressive heap of nachos into his mouth. “She isn't vindictive; she's too good for that.”

It's true that you can't imagine Jade reporting your situation out of spite. Now, out of concern, on the other hand... Still, it's been a while since that incident, so you suppose if she was going to, she'd have done it by now.

“I don't know what to do about Rose and John, though,” he admits, defeated. “Rose just wants to analyze it to death, lecture me on my codependency. And if John asks me one more time why you or I don't just get our own place...”

“Let's drop it, then.” You brush his foot with yours. “If there's nothing to worry about, then let's not worry.”

You go back to that day when you told Dave not to give a shit about what other people think. 'What about people you love?' he'd asked you. Dave almost always had questions, and though you were proud of him for thinking, you were also tired of him making you think. You'd told him that it's complicated, that you have to choose what's right for you – what makes you happy – over others' expectations, and that sometimes, this meant choosing what makes you happy over people you love.

'But if they love you,' he'd pointed out, 'shouldn't they be happy you're happy?'

'Like I said,' you'd intoned, 'it's complicated.' You'd explained to him how sometimes, when someone loves somebody else, they're so blinded by fear for their loved one's well-being that they lose sight of what would actually contribute to it.

“Hey,” Dave says softly, pushing the last of his nachos around in a pool of watery salsa. “I have a question.”

You resist making a crack about your age and requisite wisdom. “Shoot.”

“Did you ever, like, you know...” he dithers. “Did you ever want kids?”

His question takes you aback and you have to recover before you can answer. “Um, aren't you forgetting something?” You grab a straw out of the jar on the table, peel the paper off the top, and blow it square into his forehead.

“You are literally too old for this bullshit,” he laughs, folding the paper into an accordion of neat squares. “But I'm serious; if we hadn't...if things were different, if you'd hooked up with somebody, would you have wanted kids?”

“I don't know,” you dodge the question. “It's kind of irrelevant, since we lived in Texas.”

With a sweeping hand gesture Dave says, “Could've moved.”

You shrug. “You were my kid. I didn't think about it beyond that. I figured if I managed to make time for another whole human being, they'd do me the courtesy of making time for you. But to be honest, you didn't seem interested in anyone else's time. Not that I'm complaining about the way things turned out.” But you did, in the beginning. After Jake, you spent two months stewing in quiet resentment that you took out on yourself because you couldn't take it out on Dave. You wasted hours of your time imagining all the 'what if's and 'maybe's. You'd imagined moving Northeast with him, imagined him getting that teaching job he'd spoken so adamantly about, imagined putting yourself through the rest of school, belatedly. You'd imagined sending Dave off to a proper school, imagined him making nice friends and imagined inviting those nice friends to a good party with decent cake and those little gift bags for everyone at the end.

You'd imagined all of this while planning Dave's fourth birthday party, with pizza for two, and a _Land Before Time_ marathon. It struck you even then, how odd it was, that not only had Dave begrudged you of your attempts at a love life, but he'd also rejected most of the outreaches for his friendship. The only real friends he ever made were John, Rose, and Jade – largely because of not having to expend time at your expense.

“I was happy with what I had,” you decide. “And I'm here, aren't I?”

He smiles, and gets the check. “Happy birthday, man.”

He tries to coax you into a drive along the coast, but you're still tired and press him to go home. He concedes, unruffled. He tells you there's cake waiting for the two of you, anyway. You don't even remember seeing any in the fridge, that's how tired you are.

Of course, when you get home, Dave produces the cake not from the refrigerator, but from the oven, where you'd never have looked for anything. “Baked it while you were out cold,” he smirks, like it's some kind of a victory.

“Always one step ahead,” you smile, stroking his ego.

Together, you whittle down the red velvet in agreeable silence. At some point, you notice a splotch of frosting at the corner of his mouth; you wipe it off with your thumb, pause for thought, then smear it across his cheek.

“ _Hey_!” In retaliation, he scoops up two fingers' worth of frosting and paints your face with it. So naturally, you end up smashing entire pieces of cake in each other's faces, laughing and wiping your hands on one another's clothes, kissing in between swipes of paper towels.

The context of shoving cake in each other's mouths catches up with you too late, and pain is comparable to a blunt, rusty nail being forced between your ribs.

He joins you in the shower, but it doesn't gain momentum, which is honestly fine by you. You're happy to occupy the same, small space with him, to pick the crumbles of cake from his hair, to hold still as he washes you with his hands. You share a few long, enticing kisses, but it never amounts to much more than brief touches and a bite here and there. Post-shower, you compete for the large sink; you brush your teeth while he applies caffeinated cream around his eyes. Privately, you hope it doesn't work _too_ well – he's aging nicely.

In bed, you snuggle up together, limbs ensnaring and fingers finding one another. “So what d'you think?” You nuzzle his cheek, kiss his ear. “Gonna' work on that novel tomorrow?”

Dave shrugs in your arms. “Maybe. Maybe not ever.” Rolling over so that he can press his back against your chest, he yawns. “You'll find out about the future of the franchise at the premier, with everyone else. Either way,” he cranes around awkwardly to kiss your chin, “I was wrong, and you were right.”

“What?” Part of your brain jolts awake at this admittance.

“You were right, about shit that's meaningful, and shit that ain't.”

“Oh.”

“Goodnight, Bro; love you.”

“G'night.” You kiss him hard; his hair, already fluffy and dry, tickles your nose.


	20. Goodnight Moon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Full circle.

 

The decision to have Rose fly out and be Dave's plus-one at the premiere was last-minute, as was your decision to ditch Dave. Well, not 'ditch' in its classical sense, but you've opted not to walk the red carpet with him. Instead, you'll float a respectable, safe distance ahead where Personalities with microphones will pass you by. You don't much care for the attention and you're terrible at interacting, besides. One of the reasons you enjoy producing music so much is that no one ever thinks to ask you any questions about the album, no one hounds you for pictures.

Tonight is not your night. As has been the case so often in your life, tonight belongs to Dave. You and Rose have been dressed and ready for forty-odd minutes now, but Dave is still in the bathroom, primping. 

“Is he always so vain?” she asks with a smile.

“Only on date nights,” you elbow her playfully, a little nauseated by the real punchline of that joke.

“Please, as if I couldn't do better.”

“By all means, but I took you for a charitable soul, Rose.”

In the bathroom, Dave's fussing with his hair, and he still has a whitening strip stuck to his teeth. 

“You're going to be late to your own party,” you murmur in his ear. 

“There are going to be those fucking high-def cameras every-fucking-where and I'm breaking out – who the fuck still breaks out at thirty-two, are you shitting me?” Opening a sleek tube of tinted moisturizer, he starts dabbing at his face. He always gets nervous just before. 

“You look fine.” It isn't mere reassurance, but a hungry observation. In the unlikely event that you'll have the energy by the time you get home, you'd like to tear him out of that godawful suit. “But if it's still bothering you, I'd be happy to give you a facial.”

“I swear,” he growls when you perch behind him, sliding your big hands into his pockets, “if you give me a boner right now, so help me God –”

“It isn't me, it's the adrenaline.” You tease the skin under his ear with your teeth before defecting. “Now hurry up and finish your manicuring so we don't show up ten minutes into your own movie.”

Rounding on you, he says, “That's not a half-bad idea, actually.”

You get out the door on time, but only by the skin of your teeth. Dave looks a hot mess, and next to him, Rose looks like a goddess, draped in midnight taffeta. Her nails are filed to indigo talons and you can easily imagine her sinking her claws into some poor, unsuspecting young lady catering the afterparty. 

When the limousine comes to a smooth halt, Dave pulls out a bottle of cheap liquor and shot glasses. Still safe within the sanctuary of tinted windows, he pours out the shots and the three of you toast together. It burns the way only bargain liquor can, and for a moment, you flash back to the year before you adopted Dave.

Dave exits the car first, then waits for Rose, and you are deafened by the thunderous roar that washes over you. Springing ahead, you take your place nearer to the crowd than to Dave, watching him. Despite his irritation at home, he basks in the flashing lights and poses elegantly, poses absurdly, fields annoying questions with mean sarcasm. You see him defer to Rose as he grows tired of one interviewer after another. He wanders over to fans and signs things, makes idle conversation the way he'd never afford anyone with a camera crew. 

It doesn't escape your notice how he pays particular attention to a few attractive women. Still, once the parade is finally over, he slips a ' _love you_ ,' to you under his breath.

While everyone else files into the main atrium of the theater, you, Dave, and Rose take your seats in the central box. Dave plants himself between the two of you, occasionally bumping his hand into yours, or knocking your knees together, or finding any excuse to turn and speak into your ear. He is unrepentant and nothing scares you more.

You've always felt you can tell a lot about a person based on what kind of jokes they laugh at. The crowd below seems to be split into two types: people who understand sarcasm and people who understand dick jokes. Most of the film is spent glancing at Dave for his reaction, who in turn watching the audience for their reactions, and it pains you to see how disappointed he is. For a fleeting moment, you can sort of see what he meant by 'something meaningful.' 

One way or another, though, the theater is brimming with laughter: staccato guffaws and shrill giggling and caustic braying expand through the chamber and threaten to blow the roof clean off. And every so often, there is that odd, uncomfortable flicker of laughter that erupts in fits and starts as people realize just what it is they're laughing at. Dave appears the most satisfied during those moments. 

He is undeniably a brilliant craftsman: he constructs these elaborate and well-concealed traps, baits them with easy, tasteless jokes; he lures his audience with the promise a cheap laugh only to pull the trigger and challenge his own punchline – and more importantly, the people who laughed at it. He has a careful eye for the line, and a knack for walking it like a tightrope – only crossing if he knows he can take the audience down with him. Dave is talented. Dave has always been talented. That's the thing about talent; it's something you're born with. It could always use some pruning, a trellis to guide it upward, but it's always there, even in its rawest form. Dave's got talent and that's what the world likes to see.

You've just got a handful of skills and a genius IQ and comparatively, no one really gives a shit.

As the velvet curtains close on the darkened screen, the crowd stands from their seats and their applause is rowdy and leaves a ringing in your ears. There are whistles and hoots and all the trappings of success. Dave is still seated, slouched, looking on in glum amusement, a king overseeing his court. 

“Got the point across this time, I think,” you call to him over the din.

He shrugs. “I'll wait for the _Times_ review to come out. But I'll need the champagne either way.” 

Rolling your eyes, you shuffle out behind him and Rose, hanging back, waiting for the hall to clear out. You listen to their comfortable banter and wonder that they never became involved as kids, think it's a damn shame even as your gut roils with jealousy at the thought. 

Before he enters the fray in the lobby below, Dave pulls you aside, nods at Rose to go ahead of him. “Hey, you're coming to the afterparty, right?” 

You consider it. You consider that it's midnight, and that attending will inevitably mean being jostled by drunk assholes; there will certainly be socialization, socialization with strangers you're neither interested in or willing to affect politeness with. You'll do very little, apart from make terrible jokes and antagonize Dave in public – and as fun as that always is, you're a bit drained.

“I was actually thinking we could head home.”

Dave nods, but he makes a disgruntled noise. “Catch a cab; I'll meet you in an hour or less – I've got a few shoes to lick and some announcements to make.”

“So you are calling this the end, then?” you ask, astounded. 

“Nah, think I can crank out a couple more. I'd rather end it really weird, you know?”

Smiling, you give him a socially acceptable one-armed hug. “See you later.”

“Don't wait up, old man,” he smirks, winking.

Finding a taxi in the mayhem outside would be an impossibility, so instead, you take a stroll for a few blocks, relishing the cool air after the stuffiness of the crowded theater. With your hands buried in the silk-lined pockets of your slacks, you wish you'd brought a hoodie, and maybe your iPod. Something to drown out any thoughts of Dave, charming his way through the host of undoubtedly gorgeous model-types, bubbly socialites, ambitious peers.

You're not actually worried – more annoyed, than anything. 

The cabbie who picks you up looks tired, but he indulges you in conversation – though, not without a degree of shock. It's a bit of a drive back to the complex, and along the way the two of you swap stories. As it happens, he has a kid sister whom he is helping to put through college; she's slated to graduate this June. Going for social work, wants to help impoverished, troubled youth.

“Wants to make a difference where she grew up, you know?” he says. 

“What do you think?” you ask him.

The man takes a long time to think about it. The cab stops at a light, and the red glare paints his face through the windshield. Then he sighs. “I hope she does, but...I'd like to see her move on...”

“To bigger, better things,” you offer. You can't say you sympathize. “Those smaller things are pretty important, though.”

He nods, thoughtful. “Yeah, but money ain't in the smaller things.”

The old axiom, how money isn't everything, nips at the tip of your tongue but your apartment complex rises out of the black horizon and you realize, _Who the fuck am I to tell him that_? So you don't. Money isn't everything, but it's about ninety percent of the game. 

You tip him so generously that he tries to tell you you've made a mistake.

“Hey man, I tried to put my baby bro through college; I know what tuition costs.”

“Tried? What happened?” he asks you through the window, at last accepting the money.

Turning to gaze at the sandstone high-rise, you shrug. “He dropped out.” You tap the cab's passenger door. “Have a great night.”

“You too, man,” he calls as he pulls away into traffic.

In the elevator, you glance at your watch; Dave's probably extracting himself from all the obligatory conversation and headed out the door. You wonder if he'll escort Rose to her hotel or if she's found company all on her own.

You ought to shower, perhaps, but you're too tired. Your back is cramped from sitting in one position for too long and your knees ache a little. You at least brush your teeth and splash your face with warm water before crawling into bed. But the tiredness hasn't yet seeped into your bones. But reading doesn't appeal to you, and you fear that if you so much as glimpse a computer screen, you'll wake right up. So you lie in bed, drifting in and out of shallow sleep, never finding dreams, cradled by the noises of waking life.

Dave arrives home just as you're slipping out of consciousness. He mumbles to himself as he bumps into things and sheds his clothes and checks the answering machine. He leaves his keys on the dresser where you know he'll forget them. You hear the shower start and roll over, back into the waiting arms of half-sleep. 

You're jostled awake yet again by Dave getting into bed none too subtly. In spite of the sheer size of the bed, he presses himself up against you, winds his arms around you, fingers rubbing absently at your stomach. Self-consciously, you tighten up.

“It was a long night,” he tells you.

“Your own fault.”

“I know, I made my own bed.” He kisses the back of your neck. “Now I'd like to lie in it.”

Your mouth splits into a grin. “Oh, is that all?”

“Mmm.” He hums, pushes it into your skin with his lips, kissing along your spine until he rests between your shoulder blades. His hair is still damp; his breath is hot. Your whole body itches with anticipation. 

“Dave.”

“Dirk.”

“I'm tired.” You turn over and kiss the corner of his mouth. But he sneaks a hand into your hair to hold you while he takes as he pleases, sucking on your bottom lip until you sigh. He tastes like liquor and it goes foul with the minty residue in your mouth, but his tongue feels good. Years ago, you'd have been sitting up and pulling Dave into your lap, or pushing him over onto his side with your hand between his legs. It used to be that sleepy sex was some of your favorite sex; lazy, easy, a tantalizing stop-and-start affair.

Dave swings one leg over your hips and grinds, burying his face in your neck, and your body tries to keep up, tries to discard the haze of sleep. But your eyes remain closed, even as you bite your lip, even as Dave murmurs beneath your ear about sucking your cock, about getting you off with his fingers inside you. Of course, you aren't the only one who's tired here, and the two of you will likely fall asleep, tangled up in one another, a knot of limbs and breathing in each other's faces. 

It's happened before and it will happen again.

 

 

 

 

Adulthood has crippled your ability to distinguish between good and bad news. 

You're standing at the sink, scraping Dave's plate before letting it soak; you should really figure out what's going on with the dishwasher. And hey, you suppose now that you're out of a job, you'll have the time, and maybe even the energy.

The phone call came during dinner. While Dave slurped his spaghetti and managed to get Parmesan up his nose, you were informed that the company couldn't afford to pay you anymore – you and about fifteen other employees. At least it wasn't personal, and at least technically, you've been laid off. Rob even promised that if circumstances allowed, you'd be the first they'd call back. You're scrubbing absently at the plate, an odd sense of relief combating any panic that ought to be coursing through you. When the plate begins to squeak under the bristles, you stop and turn off the water. 

Dave's parked on the couch. He isn't really watching TV, but his eyes are glossed over with impending exhaustion; his nap did very little to mend him from his exciting day at the park. A good game of ponies will do that to a person.

Hoisting him onto your hip, you turn off the television. “Come on, little man, it's tooth-brushing time.” 

He whines and squirms against you. “I don't wanna',” he complains. He always complains, until he gets a mouthful of bubblegum foam. 

“I know, I know. But I have to do it, too. We'll do it together.” 

This perks him up. “Bro? I thought you had work tonight?” 

You set him beside the sink and pull up his step-stool, uncap his toothpaste and squeeze a glob onto his little red toothbrush. Childhood, if you remember right – and it doesn't feel so far off – is less forgiving about good and bad news. Breaking news to children is kind of an art form.

“It turns out,” you say gently, “I get to stay home tonight.” Phrase it like a pleasant surprise. “You and I are going to have more time to hang out together.” Frame it from all the best angles. Make it about Dave, not about you.

Dave throws his arms around you and smiles into your shirt, squealing incoherently.

You'll wait a month, maybe more, before going back to the temp agency. You really do want more time with Dave. A part of you even contemplates trying to get more assistance instead of a second job. But the idea is unsavory and a little bit of bile rises in your throat. No, once Dave is in school, you'll look for something better; something full-time.

The two of you take up the sink, with you timing your spitting around Dave's. When he's finished, you wipe his mouth and sit him down on the edge of the tub and floss his teeth for him. He makes irritated noises and fidgets throughout, but he knows it's for the best. Someday, you'll have dental, and someday, Dave will be able to be lazy. When the two of you rinse, he spits early, eyes welling up from the bite of Listerine. 

Dave seems to get a burst of second wind while you struggle to get him into pajamas, and makes a chase out of it, leading you through the apartment, over the couch, under the table. You let him run his circles until he runs conveniently right into your arms. When at last the two of you are settled and ready for bed, you tuck Dave in. He burrows under the covers, leaving room for you because you both know what time it is. 

Reading to Dave is never a linear business. He interrupts, often to ask what a word means or to read the page numbers, or to point out some odd thing in the illustrations that you never would have noticed. He likes a lot of stories, but his favorites strike you as a tad unnerving: anything with tragic undertones, bittersweet endings, things that strike fear in adults...that sort of thing.

He nods off a bit and then starts awake, with increasingly long intervals between. But you don't stop reading, even as your own eyes grow heavy. You wrap an arm around him and hold him close, eyes chasing the maze of printed ink across pages. Even as he snuffles quietly into your shirt, you read aloud.

You need Dave. You think that in spite of the scarcity of funds and in spite of your age and in spite of the childhood that haunts you, you need Dave. Perhaps even more than Dave needs you. But these thoughts are dismissed as fatigue washes in; collapsing from the inside out, your arm around your baby brother loosens and the book shifts in your slackened grip until it lies open on your body.

You fall asleep, book in hand, Dave curled into your side.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well.
> 
> I've typed out three very different sentences in this box and deleted them each, because none of them is really what I want to say. I suppose I'd like to thank each and every one of you who took the time to give me feedback, to leave kudos - to let me know you're reading. It feels strange to be at the end, almost a year later. But I am very glad to have had you all along for the ride.


End file.
